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Jones, E. Stanley 1884-1973 
T.he Christ of the Indian 
road 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/christofindianro0Ojone 





The Christ 


of the 


Indian Road 


E. Stanley Jones 


GROSSET & DUNLAP 


PUBLISHERS NEw YorRK 





By arrangement with Abingdon-Cokesbury Press 


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Copyright, 1925, by 
E. STANLEY JONES 


All rights reserved, including that of translation mto foreign languages, 
including the Scandinavian 


Printed in the United States of America 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 
RRMA clare anil: ¢ comin date eal) 5 
PREFACE TO THE SIxTH EDITION........ 7 
TRTRODUCTION TO ferns bt. cr ae ee 11 

I. Toe MESSENGER AND THE M@SSAGE...... 21 

II. Tue Motive anp END oF CHRISTIAN MiIs- 
SIONS ois Woe eae ys at Shana yesh ne eon 34 

III. Tot Growrmna Morau AnD SPIRITUAL 
SUPREMACY OF JESUS ............000. 59 

IV. Jesus Comes Turover Irrecuuar CHan- 
NELS—MAHATMA GANDHI’S PaRT...... 73 

VY. THROUGH THE REGULAR CHANNELS—SOME 
TUVANGHLISTIC SBRINS.{ cf. es haa oe 87 
VI. Tum Great HINDRANCE... 0. 0.650. seen. 108 
Vi CHM QUESTION HOUR: 2. vices. lca ett 131 
VIII. Jesus THRouGH EXPERIENCE ........... 146 
LRA BATOR WHOM .«.. coe ietee ae eins 162 
X. CHRIST AND THE OTHER FAITHS......... 178 
A... LHe CONCRETE CHRIST. $2 55¢. os 05a ceed 191 
XII. Tue Indian INTERPRETATION OF JESUS.. 199 


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THe CHRIST OF THE INDIAN Roap...... 211 


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PREFACE 


PERHAPS a few words of caution may be help- 
ful to the reader. To those familiar with India 
the title of this volume may lead the reader to 
expect the book to be what it is not—an Indian 
interpretation of Christ. It is, rather, an attempt 
to describe how Christ is becoming naturalized 
upon the Indian Road. The Indian interpre- 
tation of Christ must be left to later hands. 

To those who have no first-hand familiarity 
with conditions in India another word of caution 
may be given. The author has tried to be scrupu- 
lously careful not to overdraw the picture. He 
has let non-Christians themselves largely tell the 
story of the silent revolution in thought that is 
taking place in India. But even so, the American 
and English reader must be careful not always 
to read into the statements of the non-Christians. 
the full content of his own thinking. In that 
case unwarranted implications may be drawn 
from them. 

Christian missions have come to a crisis in 
India. A new and challenging situation con- 
fronts us. If we are to meet it, we must boldly 
follow the Christ into what are, to us, untried 
paths. In order to understand these modern 

5 


6 PREFACE 


movements one must know the past, and must 
keep constantly in mind the foundations that 
have been laid for this new day by the patient 
toil and sacrificial living of generations of mis- 
sionaries and Indian Christians. This book 
does not pretend to fill in that picture, though 
every moment the writer realizes the indebted- 
ness to those of that past who have toiled and 
looked for this day of broadening opportunity. 
In any case Christian missions are but in their 
beginnings in India. With adjusted attitude and 
Spirit they will be needed in the East for decades 
and generations to come. 

My thanks are due to Dr. David G. Downey, 
who, owing to my return to India, has graciously 
undertaken to read the proofs and to see the book 
through the press. 

At the request of the publishers the spoken 
style has been retained. 

THE AUTHOR. 
Mission House, Sitapur, U. P., India. 


PREFACE TO THE SIXTH EDITION 


Some of my readers have observed the absence 
from this book of certain notes usual in mission- 
ary textbooks. Where, they ask, are the child- 
widows, the caste system with its compart- 
mentalized and consequently paralyzed life, the 
six million sadhus roaming through India find- 
ing little and contributing less? Is Hinduism 
only a philosophical system? Is there not a pop- 
ular side with its 330,000,000 gods and goddesses, 
its endless pilgrimages and rapacious priests at 
each stage, its worship of demons and gods of 
questionable character? Has the purdah system 
been abolished? Has the appalling illiteracy 
amounting to ninety-three per cent been wiped 
out? Have these dark lines, hitherto so common 
in the picture, faded out? Is it all sweetness 
and light? 

No, these things are still there. But I have 
left them out of the picture for three reasons. 

First. India is aggrieved, and I think rightly 
so, that Christian missionaries in order to arouse 
the West to missionary activity have too often 
emphasized the dark side of the picture. What 
they have said has been true, but the picture has 
not been a true one. This overemphasis on the 
one side has often created either pity or con- 

v¢ 


8 PREFACE 


tempt in the minds of the hearers. In modern 
jargon a superiority complex has resulted. I 
do not believe a superiority complex to be the 
proper spring for missionary activity. 

Eastern travelers in America, picking and 
choosing their facts, can make out a very dark 
picture of our civilization—the slums of our 
cities, the lynchings, divorce statistics, crime 
statistics unparalleled in other cities of the 
world, and so on. They have, in fact, done so. 
As Americans we have resented it as being an 
untrue picture. Then as Christians we should 
do unto others as we would that others should 
do unto us. 

Second. Indians themselves are now alive to 
these evils and are combating them. The impact 
of Christian ideals upon the situation has 
created a conscience in regard to these things 
and we can trust India to right them as she is, 
in fact, now doing. The fact is that racial lines 
are so drawn that India will probably deal more 
drastically with her evils if: she does it from 
within than if we foreigners were always insist- 
ing upon it. As a Turkish lawyer said to us 
regarding the reforms in Turkey, “The things 
which we have done in four years no outside 
power or government could have made us do. 
We are surprised at it ourselves.” The secret 
was that they did it. 


PREFACE 9 


Third. I have tried to lay the foundations for 
Christian missions deeper than upon particular 
evils found in a particular race. Taken at their 
very best, pagan men and systems in Hast or 
West need Christ. I have said to India very 
frankly: “I do not make a special drive upon 
you because you are the neediest people of our 
race, but because you are a member of our race. 
I am convinced that the only kind of a world 
worth having is a world patterned after the mind 
and spirit of Jesus. I am therefore making a 
drive upon the world as it is, in behalf of the 
world as it ought to be, and as you are a part of 
that world I come to you. But I would not be 
here an hour if I did not know that ten others 
were doing in the land from which I come what 
I am trying to do here. We are all in the same 
deep need. Christ, I believe, can supply that 
need.” 

Another word should be added in regard to 
another seeming lack of emphasis. I have not 
emphasized the mass movement among the low 
castes because this book has been the story 
growing out of my own sphere of work. My 
work has been more connected with that mass 
movement in mind described in these pages than 
with the mass movement among the low castes. 
In spite of its obvious weaknesses and dangers 
I am deeply grateful for and rejoice in this lat- 


10 PREFACE 


ter mass movement in which there is a turning 
of these dumb millions to Christ. In spite of 
statements to the contrary, this movement is 
going on with unabated force. Since my return 
to India a friend showed a petition signed with 
thumb impressions by eighteen thousand of 
these people who desired to come into the Chris- 
tian Church. But my emphasis has been upon 
what I knew best growing out of experience. 

A further word concerning the attitudes I 
find on my return after an absence of nearly two 
years from India. I find India even more open 
and responsive than when I left. The mass 
movement in mind goes on in silent but un- 
abated vigor. As the physical atmosphere be- 
comes saturated with moisture and heavy to the 
point of precipitation, so the spiritual atmos- 
phere of India is becoming saturated with 
Christ’s thoughts and ideals and is heavy to the 
point of precipitation into Christian forms and 
expression. As to when that will take place 
depends upon how much Christlikeness we can 
put into the situation. As the leading Arya 
Samajist in India recently said to the writer, 
“Everything depends upon the Christian 
Church.” It does. 

THE AUTHOR. 
Mission House, Sitapur, U. P., India. 


INTRODUCTION 


CLEARING THE ISSUES 


WHEN the early evangelists of the Good News 
were sent out on their own, they returned 
and told Jesus “what they had done and what 
they had taught.” This evangelist must add a 
third to what he has done and what he has 
taught—what he has learned. It will not be 
primarily an account of what has been done 
through him, but what has been done to him. 

Running through it all will be the perhaps un- 
conscious testimony of how, while speaking to 
India, I was led along to a simplification of my 
task and message and faith—and I trust of my 
life. 

Recently at the close of an address a friend 
remarked, ““He has probably done some good to 
India, but India has certainly done a great deal 
for him.” India has. In my sharing with her 
what has been a gift to me I found that I had less 
than I thought I had—and more. 

I thought my task was more complex than I 
now see it to be; not less difficult but less com- 
plex. When I first went to India I was trying 
to hold a very long line—a line that stretched 
clear from Genesis to Revelation, on to Western 

11 


12 INTRODUCTION 


Civilization and to the Western Christian 
Church. I found myself bobbing up and down 
that line fighting behind Moses and David and 
Jesus and Paul and Western Civilization and 
the Christian Church. I was worried. There 
was no well-defined issue. I found the battle 
almost invariably being pitched at one of these 
three places: the Old Testament, or Western Civ- 
lization, or the Christian Church. I had the ill- 
defined but instinctive feeling that the heart of 
the matter was being left out. Then I saw that I 
eould, and should, shorten my line, that I could 
take my stand at Christ and before that non- 
Christian world refuse to know anything save 
Jesus Christ and him crucified. The sheer storm 
and stress of things had driven me to a place 
that I could hold. Then I saw that there is 
where I should have been all the time. I saw 
that the gospel lies in the person of Jesus, that 
he himself is the Good News, that my one task 
was to live and to present him. My task was 
simplified. 

But it was not only simplified—it was vital- 
ized. I found that when I was at the place of 
Jesus I was every moment upon the vital. Here 
at this place all the questions in heaven and earth 
were being settled. He was the one question 
that settled all others. 

I still believed in the Old Testament as being 


INTRODUCTION 13 


the highest revelation of God given to the world 
before Jesus’ coming; I would inwardly feed 
upon it as Jesus did. But the issue was further 
on. A Jain lawyer, a brilliant writer against 
Christianity, arose in one of my meetings and 
asked me a long list of questions regarding 
things in the Old Testament. I replied, “My 
brother, I think I can answer your questions, 
but I do not feel called on to do so. I defined 
Christianity as Christ. If you have any objec- 
tions to make against him, I am ready to hear 
them and answer them if I can.” He replied, 
“Who gave you this authority to make this dis- 
tinction? What church council gave you this 
authority?” I replied that my own Master gave 
it to me—that I was not following a church 
council, but trying to follow him, and he himself 
had said: “Ye have heard it said of old time,... 
but I say unto you,” so I was simply following 
his lead, for he made his own word final even in 
Scripture. I was bringing the battle up from 
that incomplete stage of Revelation to the final 
—to Jesus. Revelation was progressive, ° cul- 
minating in him. Why should I, then, pitch my 
battle at an imperfect stage when the perfect 
was here in him? My lawyer friend saw with 
dismay that a great many of his books written 
against Christianity had gone into ashes by my 
definition. They were beside the point. But the 


14 INTRODUCTION 


lawyer was not to blame for missing the point. 
Had we not often by our writings and by our 
attitude led him to believe that we did make the 
issue there? 

Our confusion was Peter’s confusion which 
the Father’s voice and the vision of Jesus clari- 
fied. On the Mount of Transfiguration, Moses, 
representing the law, and Elijah the prophets, 
talked with Jesus, the New Revelation. The Jew- 
ish heart of Peter wanted to keep all three, and 
put them on the same level—he wanted to build 
three tabernacles for them. A voice from the 
- cloud spoke, “This is my beloved Son; hear him” 
—the law and the prophets are fulfilled in him; 
hear him. And when they lifted up their eyes 
they saw no man save Jesus only. He filled their 
horizon. He must fill ours. 

Again, have we not often in the past led India 
and the non-Christian world to think that our 
type of civilization in the West is the issue? 
Before the Great War was not Western greatness 
often preached as a reason for the East becoming 
Christian? This was a false trail and led us 
into many embarrassments, calling for endless 
apologies and explanations. 

There is little to be wondered at that India 
hesitates about our civilization—great and beau- 
tiful on certain sides and weak and ugly on 
others. While some of the contacts of the West 


INTRODUCTION 15 


with the East have been in terms of beautiful 
self-sacrifice and loving service, some of them 
have been ugly and un-Christian. But that we 
are not more Christian in the West is under- 
standable when we remember in what manner 
much of our Christianity was propagated in 
Europe. Many of the evils which now afflict 
the West came in with it. While it is true that 
many of the first missionaries to the Huropean 
tribes were men of rare saintliness and self-sac- 
rifice, nevertheless Christianity was not always 
propagated by saintliness and self-sacrifice. 

Take three illustrations that may show why 
three great un-Christian things lie back in our 
civilizations. 

All Russia became Christian with Vladimir : 
the Emperor. He desired to become a Christian, 
but hesitated, for, as being beneath his dignity, 
he would not be baptized by the local clergy. 
He wanted the Patriarch of Constantinople to 
perform the ceremony—that would give the de- 
Sired dignity. But to ask him to come to do it 
would be receiving a bounty at the hands of an- 
other. He decided that the only thing consonant 
with his honor would be to conquer Constan- 
tinople and compel the Patriarch to baptize him. 
He would then stand as dictator and not as 
suppliant. That was actually carried out. Con- 
stantinople was captured and the Patriarch 


16 INTRODUCTION 


forced to baptize him. Thus Russia became 
Christian! Is it to be wondered at that dom- 
ination still continues in the West in spite of 
Christianity? It came in with it. 

Another. The Saxons, a warring tribe of 
Europe, were practically compelled to become 
Christians. They consented on one condition. 
That condition would only be known at the time 
of their baptism. When these warriors were put 
under the water as a symbol that their old life 
was dead, they went under—all except their right 
arms. They held them out, lifted above their 
heads. These were their fighting arms. They 
were never Christianized! Is it to be wondered 
at that war continues in the West in spite of 
Christianity? It came in with it. 

Another. One Mayflower carried the Pilgrim 
Fathers to religious liberty in America; another 
Mayflower goes to bring a load of slaves to these 
same seekers after liberty. The good ship “Jesus” 
was in the slave trade for our fathers. Is it to be 
wondered at that race and color prejudice still 
exists in the West in spite of Christianity? It 
came in with it. 

The East feels that these things are still there. 
But standing amid the shadows of Western civ- 
ilization, India has seen a Figure who has 
greatly attracted her. She has hesitated in re- 
gard to any allegiance to him, for India has 


INTRODUCTION 17 


thought that if she took one she would have to 
take both—Christ and Western civilization went 
together. Now it is dawning upon the mind of 
India that she can have one without the other— 
Christ without Western civilization. That dawn- 
ing revelation is of tremendous significance to 
them—and to us. 

“Do you mean to say,” said a Hindu lawyer 
in one of my meetings about seven years ago, 
“that you are not here to wipe out our civiliza- 
tion and replace it with your own? Do you 
mean that your message is Christ without any 
implications that we must accept Western Civ- 
ilization? JI have hated Christianity, but if 
Christianity is Christ, I do not see how we In- 
dians can hate it.” I could assure him that my 
message was that and only that. But this was 
seven years ago. That matter has now become 
clarified, more or less. It has become clear that 
we are not there to implant Western civilization. 

They may take as little or as much from West- 
ern civilization as they like—and there is much 
that is tremendously worth while—but we do 
not make it the issue. The fact is that if we do 
not make it the issue, they will probably take 
more from it than if we did. 

But the swift and often accurate intuitions of 
the Indian have gone further. He is making an 
amazing and remarkable discovery, namely, that 


18 INTRODUCTION 


Christianity and Jesus are not the same—that 
they may have Jesus without the system that has 
been built up around him in the West. 

A prominent lecturer, who has just returned 
from India, says that this discovery on the part 
of India of the difference between Christianity 
and Jesus “can be called nothing less than a dis- 
covery of the first magnitude.” Let it be said 
that the suggestion as to the difference is not 
new, it has been said before. But the thing that 
is new is that a people before their acceptance of 
Christianity have noted the distinction and seem 
inclined to act upon it. It is a most significant 
thing for India and the world that a great people 
of amazing spiritual capacities is seeing, with 
remarkable insight, that Christ is the center of 
Christianity, that utter commitment to him and 
catching his mind and spirit, and living his life 
constitute a Christian. This realization has 
remarkable potentialities for the future religious 
history of the whole race. 

Looking upon it in the large, I cannot help 
wondering if there is not a Providence in the fact 
that India has not accepted Christianity en 
masse before this discovery was fixed in her 
mind. If she had accepted Christianity without 
this clarification, her Christianity would be but 
a pale copy of ours and would have shared its 
weaknesses. But with this discovery taking place 


INTRODUCTION 19 


before acceptance it may mean that at this period 
of our racial history the most potentially spirit- 
ual race of the world may accept Christ as Chris- 
tianity, may put that emphasis upon it, may 
restore the lost radiance of the early days when 
he was the center, and may give us a new burst 
of spiritual power. 

For in all the history of Christianity whenever 
there has been a new emphasis upon Jesus there 
has been a fresh outburst of spiritual vitality 
and virility. As Bossuet says, “Whenever 
Christianity has struck out a new path in her 
journey it has been because the personality of 
Jesus has again become living, and a ray from 
his being has once more illuminated the world.” 

Out of a subject race came this gospel in the 
beginning, and it may be that out of another sub- 
ject race may come its clarification and revivifi- 
cation. Some of us feel that the next great - 
spiritual impact upon the soul of the race is due 
to come by way of India. 


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CHAPTER I 
THE MESSENGER AND THE MESSAGE 


I HAVE been asked to tell in this book of my 
evangelistic experiences in the East. I have 
found that all real evangelistic work begins in 
the evangelist. Around the world the problem 
of Christian work is the problem of the Christian 
worker. As family training cannot rise above 
family character, so Christian service cannot 
rise above the Christian servant. 

I, therefore, cannot begin it in any better way 
than to tell of a bit of personal experience— 
apart from which I question whether I would 
have had the courage to undertake it. After over 
eight years continuously in India in various 
types of missionary work, ranging from pastor 
of an English church, head of a publishing house, 
missionary to the villages, district superinten- 
dent of large areas, I felt strangely drawn to 
work among the educated high castes, the intel- 
ligentsia. As a mission we were doing very little 
indeed among them. We had taken the line of 
least resistance and nearly all our work was 
among the low castes. 

Along with my regular work I had started a 

21 


22 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


Bible class and study group at an Indian club 
house where leading Hindus and Mohammedans 
gathered. After tennis in the evenings we would 
sit together until darkness fell and study the 
New Testament and discuss spiritual matters. 
One day one of the leading government officials, 
a Hindu, remarked, ‘How long has this mission 
been in this city?” I told him about fifty years. 
He asked very pointedly: “Then why have you 
gone only to the low castes? Why haven’t you 
come to us?” I replied that I supposed it was 
because we thought they did not want us. He 
replied: “It is a mistake. We want you if you 
will come in the right way.” We want you if 
you will come in the right way! Almost every 
moment since then I have been in eager quest 
for that right way. I have come to the con- 
clusion that the right way was just to be a Chris- 
tian with all the fearless implications of that 
term. 

But who was sufficient for these things? For 
it meant standing down amid the currents of 
thought and national movements sweeping over 
India and interpreting Christ to the situation. 
I was painfully conscious that I was not intel- 
lectually prepared for it. I was the more pain- 
fully conscious that I was not Christian enough 
to do what the situation demanded. And most 
depressing of all, I was physically broken. 


THE MESSENGER AND MESSAGE 23 


The eight years of strain had brought on a! 
nervous exhaustion and brain fatigue so that 
there were several collapses in India before I 
left for furlough. On board ship while speaking 
in a Sunday morning service there was another 
collapse. I took a year’s furlough in America. 
On my way back to India I was holding evan- 
gelistic meetings among the university students 
of the Philippine Islands at Manila. Several 
hundreds of these Roman Catholic students pro- = 


fessed conversion. But in the midst of the strain ——~ 


of the meetings my old trouble came back. There 
were several collapses. I went on to India with 
a deepening cloud upon me. Here I was begin- 
ning a new term of service in this trying climate 
and beginning it—broken. I went straight to the 
hills upon arrival and took a complete rest for 
several months. I came down to the plains to 
try it out and found that I was just as badly off 
as ever. I went to the hills again. When I came 
down the second time I saw that I could go no 
further, I was at the end of my resources, my 
health was shattered. Here I was facing this 
call and task and yet utterly unprepared for it 
in every possible way. 

I saw that unless I got help from somewhere 
I would have to give up my missionary career, 
go back to America and go to work on a farm 
to try to regain my health. It was one of my 


24 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


darkest hours. At that time I was in a meeting 
at Lucknow. While in prayer, not particularly 
thinking about myself, a Voice seemed to say, 
“Are you yourself ready for this work to which 
I have called you?” I replied: “No, Lord, I am 
done for. I have reached the end of my re- 
sources.” The Voice replied, “If you will turn 
that over to me and not worry about it, I will 
take care of it.” I quickly answered, “Lord, I 
close the bargain right here.” A great peace 
settled into my heart and pervaded me. I knew it 
was done! Life—abundant Life—had taken pos- 
session of me. I was so lifted up that I scarcely 
touched the road as I quietly walked home that 
night. Every inch was holy ground. For days 
after that I hardly knew I had a body. I went 
through the days, working all day and far into 
the night, and came down to bedtime wondering 
why in the world I should ever go to bed at all, 
for there was not the slightest trace of tiredness 
of any kind. I seemed possessed by Life and 
Peace and Rest—by Christ himself. 

The question came as to whether I should tell 
this. I shrank from it, but felt I should—and 
did. After that it was sink or swim before every- 
body. But nine of the most strenuous years of 
my life have gone by since then, and the old 
trouble has never returned, and I have never had 
such health. But it was more than a physical 


THE MESSENGER AND MESSAGE 25 


Touch. I seemed to have tapped new Life for 
body, mind, and spirit. Life was on a perma- 
nently higher level. And I had done nothing 
but take it! 

I suppose that this experience can be picked 
to pieces psychologically and explained. It does 
not matter. Life is bigger than processes and 
overflows them. Christ to me had become Life. 

Apart from this Touch I question if I would 
have had the courage to answer the call to work 
among these leaders of India’s thought and life. 
It was too big and too exacting. But here I saw 
my Resources. And they have not failed. 

Now a word as to that right method of ap- 
proach. There were two or three methods of 
approach then current: (1) The old method of 
attacking the weaknesses of other religions and 
then trying to establish your own on the ruins 
of the other. (2) The method of Doctor Far- 
quhar, which was to show how Christianity ful- 
fills the ancient faiths—a vast improvement on 
the old method. (8) The method of starting 
with a general subject of interest to all, and then 
ending up with a Christian message and appeal. 

I felt instinctively that there should be a bet- » 
ter approach than any of these three. I see now 
how I was feeling after it. I have before me a 
note written eight years ago laying down some 
principles I thought we should follow. (1) Be 


26 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


absolutely frank—there should be no camouflage 
in hiding one’s meaning or purpose by noncom- 
mittal subjects. The audience must know ex- 
actly what it is coming to hear. (2) Announce 
beforehand that there is to be no attack upon 
anyone’s religion. If there is any attack in it, 
it must be by the positive presentation of Christ. 
He himself must be the attack. That would mean 
that that kind of an attack may turn in two di- 
rections—upon us as well as upon them. He 
would judge both of us. This would tend to save 
us from feelings and attitudes of superiority, so 
ruinous to Christian work. (3) Allow them to 
ask questions at the close—face everything and 
dodge no difficulties. (4) Get the leading non- 
Christians of the city where the meetings are 
held to become chairmen of our meetings. (5) 
Christianity must be defined as Christ, not the 
Old Testament, not Western civilization, not even 
the system built around him in the West, but 
Christ himself and to be a Christian is to follow 
him. (6) Christ must be interpreted in terms 
of Christian experience rather than through mere 
argument. 

That was written eight years ago. As I look 
back I find that we have been led forward in 
two most important steps since then: (1) I 
have dropped out the term “Christianity” from 
my announcements (it isn’t found in the Scrip- 


THE MESSENGER AND MESSAGE 27 


tures, is it?), for it had connotations that con- 
fused, and instead I have used the name of Christ 
in subjects announced and in the address itself. 
The other way I had to keep explaining that I 
meant Christ by Christianity. (2) Christ must 
be in an Indian setting. It must be the Christ 
of the Indian Road. I saw that no movement 
would succeed in India that cuts across the grow- 
ing national consciousness of India, that Chris- 
tianity did seem to be cutting across that na- 
tional consciousness, it was therefore not suc- 
ceeding—at least among the nationally conscious 
classes. A leading Nationalist said to me, “I 
am not afraid of Christianity as such, but I am 
afraid of what is happening. Everyone who be- 
comes a Christian is lost to our national cause.” 
No wonder he suspected it. Christianity to suc- 
ceed must stand, not with Cesar, nor depend 
upon government backing and help, but must 
stand with the people. It must work with the 
national grain and not against it. Christ must 
not seem a Western Partisan of White Rule, but 
a Brother of Men. We would welcome to our 
fellowship the modern equivalent of the Zealot, 
the nationalist, even as our Master did. 

As to the manner and spirit of the presenta- 
tion of that message, we should consider it of 
the highest importance that the penetrating 
statement of Tagore should be kept in mind that 


aa 


28 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


“when missionaries bring their truth to a strange 
land, unless they bring it in the form of homage 
it is not accepted and should not be. The man- 
ner of offering it to you must not be at all dis- 
cordant with your own national thought and 
your self-respect.” I felt that we who come from 
a foreign land should have the inward feeling, 
if not the outward signs, of being adopted sons 
of India, and we should offer our message ask a 
homage to our adopted land; respect should 
characterize our very attitude; India should be 
home, her future our future, and we her serv- 
ants for Jesus’ sake. 

We have come, then, this far in our thinking: 
that the Christ of the Indian Road, with all the 
fullness of meaning that we can put into those 
words, should be our message to India. 

That this centering of everything in Jesus is 
the right lead is remarkably corroborated by 
Doctor Gilkey, the Barrows lecturer, who has 
just returned from a great hearing in India. 
After consultation with a great many, of whom 
I was honored to be one, he chose as the subject 
for the lectures, “The Personality of Jesus.” To 
choose such a subject was in itself an adventure. 
A leading Christian college president in India 
said to Doctor Gilkey: “If you had chosen that 
subject as recently as five years ago, or even 
three, you would have had no hearing. I am as 


THE MESSENGER AND MESSAGE 29 


much amazed as you are at this burst of interest 
and these crowds.” The leading Hindu social 
thinker of India, commenting in his paper, re- 
marked, “The Barrows lecturer could not have 
chosen a subject of more vital interest in India 
to-day than the subject, ‘The Personality of 
Jesus.” It was good to find my own experience 
corroborated in the experience of another. 

Hitherto it has been exceedingly difficult to 
get non-Christians to come to a Christian ad- 
dress of any kind. But in the most prom- 
inent Hindu, a Mohammedan judge, and a Chris- 
tian missionary signed the notices that went out 
calling the meetings. To me at that time it was 
a new experience to have them do it. An expe- 
rienced missionary said to me after one of the 
meetings, “If you had told me a week ago that 
the leading men of this city would sit night after 
night listening to the straightest gospel one could 
present and ask for more, I would not have be- 
lieved it, and yet they are doing it.” I have 
found that they will listen when that gospel is 
Christ and are drawn when he is lifted up. 

It may be that we will yet discover that good 
Christianity is good tactics, that the straight- 
forward, open proclamation of Jesus is the best 
method. Paul believed this, for he says, “I dis- 
own those practices which very shame conceals 
from view; I do not go at it craftily, I do not 





30 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


falsify the word of God; I state the truth openly 
and so commend myself to every man’s con- 
science in the sight of God. . . . It is Christ 
Jesus as Lord, not myself, that I proclaim” (2 
Cor. 4. 2-5, Moffatt). He let Jesus commend 
himself to every man’s conscience, for he knew 
that Jesus appeals to the soul as light appeals 
to the eye, as truth fits the conscience, as 
beauty speaks to the esthetic nature. For Christ 
and the soul are made for one another, and when 
they are brought together deep speaks to deep 
and wounds answer wounds. 

That this approach is probably sound is seen 
by the statement of the non-Christian chairman 
who rebuked a Christian speaker because he had 
tried to come at it gradually: ““We can speak of 
God ourselves, we expect to hear from you about 
Christ.” 

We often quote Paul’s speech at Athens as a 
model of missionary approach and yet it was one 
of Paul’s biggest failures. He did not succeed 
in founding a church there. Mackintosh 
analyzes his failure thus: “The Christian propa- 
ganda failed or prospered in proportion as the 
fresh data for religion present in Jesus were 
studiously concealed or openly proclaimed. Take 
Paul’s address at Athens: says some fine things, 
God’s spirituality, a God not afar off—one in 
whom we live and move, creation instead of 


THE MESSENGER AND MESSAGE 31 


chaos. Providence instead of chance, men of one 
blood instead of proud distinction between Greek 
and Barbarian. But.at no point is publicity given 
to the distinctive Christian message. In this 
studied omission of the cross is the secret of his 
comparative failure at Athens and his subse- 
quent change at Corinth. He writes penitently, 
‘I determined to know nothing among you save 
Jesus Christ and him crucified.’ The gospel had 
lost its savour when it was merged in Jewish 
commonplace” (The Originality of the Christian 
Message, Mackintosh). 

But the Hindu insists, and rightly so, that it 
must not be “an incrusted Christ,” to use the 
words of the student representative before the 
World’s Student Conference at Peking. It must 
not be a Christ bound with the grave clothes of : 
long-buried doctrinal controversy, but a Christ 
as fresh and living and as untrammeled as the 
one that greeted Mary at the empty tomb on that 
first Easter morning. 

A Hindu puts the matter thus: “We have been 
unwilling to receive Christ into our hearts, but 
we alone are not responsible for this. Christian 
missionaries have held out a Christ completely 
covered by their Christianity. Up to now their 
special effort has been to defeat our religious doc- 
trines, and therefore we have been prepared to 
fight in order to self-defense. Men cannot judge 


32 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


when they are in a state of war. In the excite 
ment of that intoxication while intending to 
strike the Christians we have struck Christ” 
(The Goal of India, Holland). 

But we too must acknowledge our part in the 
mistake and see to it that in the future India has 
a chance to respond to an untrammeled Christ. 

A friend of mine was talking to a Brahman 
gentleman when the Brahman turned to him and 
said, “I don’t like the Christ of your creeds and 
the Christ of your churches.” My friend quietly 
replied, “Then how would you like the Christ of 
the Indian Road?” The Brahman thought a 
moment, mentally picturing the Christ of the 
Indian Road—he saw him dressed in Sadhus’ 
garments, seated by the wayside with the crowds 
about him, healing blind men who felt their way 
to him, putting his hands upon the heads of poor, 
unclean lepers who fell at his feet, announcing 
the good tidings of the Kingdom to stricken 
folks, staggering up a lone hill with a broken 
heart and dying upon a wayside cross for men, 
but rising triumphantly and walking on that 
road again. He suddenly turned to the friend 
and earnestly said, “I could love and follow the 
Christ of the Indian Road.” 

How differs this Christ of the Indian Road 
from the Christ of the Galilean Road? Not 
at all. 


THE MESSENGER AND MESSAGE 33 


Christ is becoming a familiar Figure upon the 
Indian Road. He is becoming naturalized there. 
Upon the road of India’s thinking you meet with 
him again and again, on the highways of India’s 
affection you feel his gracious Presence, on the 
ways of her decisions and actions he is becoming 
regal and authoritative. And the voice of India 
is beginning to say with Whittier: 

“The healing of the seamless dress 

Is by our beds of pain; 
We touch him in life’s throng and press, 
And we are whole again.” 


CHAPTER II 


THE MOTIVE AND END OF CHRISTIAN 
MISSIONS 


THERE is a good deal of misunderstanding as 
to why we are undertaking Christian missions 
and as to what we are really trying to do. A very 
Severe criticism is beating upon this whole ques- 
tion of missions from many angles and sources. 
Personally I welcome it. If what we are doing 
is real it will shine all the more. If it isn’t real, 
the sooner we find it out the better. 

We have been called international meddlers, 
creed mongers to the East, feverish ecclesiastics 
compassing land and sea to gain another prose- 
lyte. From the other side comes the criticism 
that we satisfy a racial superiority complex 
when we go on helpful service to other nations; 
that we are the kindly side of imperialism—we 
go ahead and touch the situation in terms of 
schools and hospitals and human helpfulness, 
then imperialism comes along and gathers up 
the situation in the name of empire; or that 
capitalism takes over and exploits the situation 
as intrepid missionaries open it up. Again it 
is said that it is a bit of spiritual impertinence 
to come to a nation that can produce a Gandhi or 

34 


THE MOTIVE AND END 35 


a Tagore. Finally we are told that the whole 
missionary movement is a mistake, since, as non- 
Christian investigators tell us, the last command 
of Jesus to go into the world and preach the gos- 
pel is an interpolation, hence the whole is 
founded upon a mistaken idea. 

These are serious criticisms and must be met 
fairly and squarely. If this whole question of 
missions is to hold the affections of the church 
in the future, we must be sure that we are about 
a business that commends itself to the mind as 
well, for what does not hold the mind will soon 


not hold the heart. Besides, let it be noted that 


if Christianity isn’t worth exporting it isn’t 
worth keeping. If we cannot share it, we cannot 
keep it. 

Some of the motives that were valid in the past 
are not holding good to-day. In the days when I 
volunteered to be a missionary the prevailing 
thought was that here is a cataract of human 
souls pouring over into perdition and that we 
were to rescue aS many as possible. Rightly or 
wrongly, this idea is no longer prevailing as a 
motive for foreign missions. Then at the close of 
the Great War there was the feeling that democ- 
racy was the panacea for the world’s ills, and that 
America, being the embodiment of the democratic 
ideal, should loose democracy, permeated with 
Christianity, upon the world. <A good deal of 


36 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


the thought underlying the Methodist Centenary 
and the Interchurch World Movement was per- 
vaded with this idea. We now see that democ- 
racy, fine as it is, is no panacea for the world’s 
diseases, that paralyzing evils can flourish in a 
democracy as flagrantly as in an autocracy. A 
thoughtful Hindu, after reading Bryce’s Modern 
Democracies, put it down and remarked to a 
friend, “After all, democracy is only an ideal, 
and that ideal will never be realized until the 
kingdom of God comes on earth as it is in 
heaven.” We must go deeper than democracy. 

Then there was a time when we thought we 
were there in the East to Westernize it in gen- 
eral. I remember very vividly an address given 
twenty years ago by a prominent Christian 
editor, on the lines, 


“Out of the darkness of night 
The world rolls into light. 
It is daybreak everywhere.” 


The whole address was a recounting of electric 
cars in Bombay, and American plows in Africa 
and dress suits in Japan as a sign that it is 
daybreak everywhere! I am frank to say that I 
would not turn over my hand to Westernize the 
Kast, but I trust I would give my life to Chris- 
tianize it. It cannot be too clearly said that they 
are not synonymous. We have seen as by a lurid 


THE MOTIVE AND END 37 


flash during this last war that much of our civ- 
ilization is still held under the sway of pagan 
ideals. Who was it that prayed, “Oh, to see the 
world with the lid off’? Well, we have seen it 
with the lid off, and the grim form of our pagan 
past leered out of the depths at us. That pagan 
past was controlling much of the submerged life 
of our outwardly brilliant civilization. To see 
many of our modern cities with the lid off would 
cure us of an easy optimism. No, paganism is 
not a thing to which we can point on the map and 
say, “It is here,” “It is there.” It is not a geo- 
graphical something, but a matter of the spirit, 
and there may be vast areas of thought and pur- 
pose and spirit that are still pagan on both sides 
of the world. Paganism may be either in East 
or West. 

As yet there is no such thing as a Christian na- 
tion. There are Christianized individuals and 
groups, but the collective life of no people has 
been founded upon the outlook of Jesus. Weare 
only partially Christianized. That does not 
mean that we are not appreciative of and thank- 
ful for the Christianization that has taken place, 
nor are we blind to the fact that our civilization 
is probably the best that has been produced so 
far in human history, but we are not measuring 
ourselves by ourselves, but in the white light of 
the person of Jesus. 


388 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


We want the East to keep its own soul—only 
thus can it be creative. We are not there to 
plaster Western civilization upon the East, to 
make it a pale copy of ourselves. We must go 
deeper—infinitely deeper—than that. 

Again, we are not there to give its people a 
blocked-off, rigid, ecclesiastical and theological 
system, saying to them, “Take that in its entirety 
or nothing.” Jesus is the gospel—he himself is 
the good news. Men went out in those early days 
and preached Jesus and the resurrection—a 
risen Jesus. But just as a stream takes on the 
coloring of the soil over which it flows, so Chris- 
tianity in its flowing through the soils of the dif- 
ferent racial and national outlooks took on col- 
oring from them. We have added a good deal to 
the central message—Jesus. Some of it is worth 
surviving, for it has come out of reality. Some 
of it will not stand the shock of transplantation. 
It is a shock to any organism to be transplanted. 
I have seen a good many star preachers visit the 
East and have their messages translated. The 
result has often been disastrous. After the 
rhetoric and fine periods had been eliminated as 
untranslatable there was not enough basis of 
ideas to go over to be reclothed in another lan- 
guage. Some of our ecclesiastical systems built 
upon a controversy lose meaning when they pass 
over into a totally different atmosphere. But 


THE MOTIVE AND END 39 


Jesus is universal. He can stand the shock of 
transplantation. He appeals to the universal 
heart. 

We will put our civilization and our ecclesias- 
tical systems at the disposal of India to take as 
much as may suit their purposes. But we do not 
insist upon these. We will give them Christ, 
and urge them to interpret him through their 
own genius and life. Then the interpretation 
will be first-hand and vital. 

If this viewpoint hurts our denominational 
pride, it may help our Christianity. 

If we are not in India to do these things, just 
for what purpose are we there? We believe there 
are four great elemental needs of East and West: 
an adequate goal for character; a moral and spir- 
itual conversion from what we are; a free, full 
life; God. We believe that Jesus in a supreme , 
way gives these four things. 

Each system must be judged by its output, 
its fruit. ‘The outcome is the criterion.” What 
are we trying to produce? The ends of the dif- 
ferent systems of thought and faith may be 
summed up as follows: Greece said, “Be mod- 
erate—know thyself”; Rome said, “Be strong— 
order thyself”; Confucianism says, “Be superior 
—correct thyself’ ; Shintoism says, “Be loyal— 
suppress thyself’; Buddhism says, “Be disil- 
lusioned—annihilate thyself”; Hinduism says, 


40 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


“Be separated—merge thyself”; Mohammedan- 
ism says, “Be submissive—assert thyself’; Ju- 
daism says, “Be holy—conform thyself” ; Modern 
Materialism says, “Be industrious—enjoy thy- 
self’; Modern Dilettanteism says, “Be broad— 
cultivate thyself” ; Christianity says, “Be Christ- 
like—give thyself.” 

If the end and motive of Christianity, and 
therefore of Christian missions, is to produce 
Christlike character, I have no apology for being 
a Christian missionary, for I know nothing 
higher for God or man than to be Christlike. 

I know nothing higher for God. If God in 
character is like Jesus, he is a good God and 
trustable. The present-day doubt is not concern- 
ing Christ, but concerning God. Men wonder if 
there can be a good God back of things when they 
see earthquakes wipe out the innocent and the 
guilty alike and innocent little children suffer 
from nameless diseases they did not bring on 
themselves. But the distracted and doubting 
mind turns toward Jesus with relief and says, 
“If God is like that, he is all right.” Ag Chris- 
tians we affirm that he is—that he is Christlike 
in character, and we say it without qualification 
and without the slightest stammering of the 
tongue. We believe that “God is Jesus every- 
where” and Jesus is God here—the human life 
of God. 


THE MOTIVE AND END 41 


If God thinks in terms of little children as 
Jesus did, cares for the leper, the outcast, and 
the blind, and if his heart is like that gentle 
heart that broke upon the cross, then he can have 
my heart without reservation and without ques- 
tion. 

If the finest spirits of the human race should 
sit down and think out the kind of a God they 
would like to see in the universe, his moral and 
spiritual likeness would gradually form like unto 
the Son of man. The greatest news that has ever 
been broken to the human race is the news that 
God is like Christ. And the greatest news that 
we can break to that non-Christian world is just 
that—that the God whom you have dimly real- 
ized, but about whose character you are uncer- 
tain, is like Christ. I have watched the look of 
incredulity come into the faces of men in India 
as that announcement is made. But incredulity 
gives way to the thought that God ought to be 
like that, and that, in turn, to the thought that 
he is. “I have thrown over everything in my 
belief as to the future life,” said one of the most 
brilliant Hindus, “except the continuity of hu- 
man existence and the consistency of the charac- 
ter of God.” The consistency of the character 
of God had been fixed for him by Jess, concern- 
ing whom he said to me, “Jesus is the highest 
expression of God we have ever seen.” That 


42 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


consistency of the character of God is fleeting 
and intangible until Jesus fixes it forever in the 
soul. 

Further, I know nothing higher for man than 
to be Christlike. The highest adjective descrip- 
tive of character in any language is the adjective 

'“Christlike.” No higher compliment can be paid 
‘\ to human nature than to be called Christlike. 
' When India, a non-Christian nation, wanted to 
pay her highest compliment to her highest son, 
she searched for the highest term she knew and 
called Gandhi a Christlike man. 

We thoughtfully throw down this ideal before 
the philosophers of the world, the statesmen, the 
moralists, the reformers, the religious thinkers, 
and we say to them: “Brother men, this is what 
we are trying to produce. We think it is worth 

~ while to produce Christlike character. Do you 
know anything finer and better? Do you know 
of any nobler goal? Is there any pattern which 
you have conceived that surpasses this in being 
just what life ought to be? If so, show us, and 
before God, we will leave this and seek the 
other.” I believe that the lips of the world are 
dumb and silent before the question of finding 
anything better. In the realm of character Jesus 
has the field. In the struggle and clash of ideals 
for human life his is the fittest to survive. Men 
need a goal for character, and Jesus is that goal. 


THE MOTIVE AND END 43 


But a goal is not sufficient. Something has 
gone wrong with life. Weare not what we ought 
to be. The “ought-to-be” stands over against the 
“is.” We need something to happen to us and in 
us that will save us from sin and sinning. We 
need moral and spiritual conversion. 

But men need more than a goal, and a conver- 
sion from what they are; they need a free, full 
life, for life is crippled and dwarfed. A Jewish 
lady in India said to the writer: “You talk to 
these people of religion. What they need is 
bread. Look how starved and pinched they are. 
Why don’t you give them bread?” India does 
need bread and needs it desperately. No one 
can stand amid the appalling poverty of India 
with the average per capita income less than 
five cents a day, and where forty million people 
have never known a full stomach and will never 
know it from birth to death, and not feel the 
desperate need of helping India to get bread— 
more of it and quickly. Our industrial schools, 
our experimental farms, our co-operative banks 
and numerous other endeavors at economic up- 
lift prove that we are keenly alive to the need of 
helping India get bread. 

But a great, unbiassed economist came to the 
conclusion that “almost every economic evil in 
India is rooted in religious and social custom.” 
Every time you try to lift India economically 


44 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


you run into a custom that balks you. Therefore, 
while I thank God for every endeavor to help 
India to get more bread, I believe that the best 
way to give India bread is to give her Christ. 
For Christ makes life free. 

Moreover, I want to see India politically free. 
This does not mean that India must necessarily 
be without the British Empire. I personally 
hope that she will remain within it. But with- 
out self-determination India will not make her 
real contribution to the world. Seeley was right 
when he said that “moral deterioration is bound 
to set in any subject race.’ While I believe 
that England has given India as good govern- 
ment as one nation is capable of giving to an- 
other, nevertheless, I am convinced with the na- 
tionalist that “good government is no substitute 
for self-government.” I want to see India stand 
upon her own feet. But the real shackles that 
bind India are within. Loose her there and free- 
dom from without is that moment assured. 

After Mahatma Gandhi’s release from prison 
I asked him what, in his opinion, was the reason 
for the collapse of his movement while he was 
in jail. He threw the question back on me and 
asked me what I thought was the cause. I re- 
plied that I thought that since life finally came 
to the level of the habitual thinking, the cause 
lay back in the thinking of India. In the mind 


THE MOTIVE AND END 45 


of the Mohammedan there is gripping him in the 
inmost places the thought of Kismet—everything 
is predestined by the sovereign will of Allah. 


When he gets under difficulties the tendency is _ 
to tap his forehead and say: “What can I do? / 
My Kismet is bad.” It is more or less fatalistic. | 


On the other hand the Hindu has lying back in 
his mind the thought of Karma—that we are in 
the grip of the results of the deeds of the previous 
birth. When the Hindu runs against difficult 
situations he usually says: “What can I do? 
my Karma is bad.” It too is more or less fatal- 
istic and consequently paralyzing. I suggested 
to the Mahatma that under the spell of his per- 
sonality India forgot both Kismet and Karma 
and was creative, the national life was purified 
and impossible things accomplished. But when 
he was taken away the older and deeper ideas of 
Kismet and Karma reasserted themselves, and 
under the difficulties that confronted her India 
sat down. The movement collapsed. I sug- 
gested that, as he well knew and practiced in a 
wonderful way, there was a third ideal of life, 
namely, the cross. Now, the cross never knows 
defeat, for itself is Defeat, and you cannot defeat 


Defeat. You cannot break Brokenness. It starts » 


with defeat and accepts that as a way of life. 
But in that very attitude it finds its victory. It 
never knows when it is defeated, for it turns 


46 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


every impediment into an instrument, and every 
difficulty into a door, every cross into a means of 
redemption. So I concluded that any people that 
would put the cross at the center of its thought 
and life would never know when it was defeated. 
It would have a quenchless hope that Easter 
morning lies just behind every Calvary. It was 
therefore my considered belief that India will 
never permanently rise until both Kismet and 
Karma are replaced in the mind of India by the 
Cross. 

As Doctor Tagore puts it, “Things come up to 
a certain place in India and then stop.” The 
reason for this I feel to be in the above. 
Almost every economic, social, and national evil 
roots back in cramping custom. I believe, there- 
fore, that the best way to make India free eco- 
nomically, socially, and politically is to give her 
Christ. 

India has always had the genius for addition; 
she has lacked elimination. She has absorbed 
everything that has come along, but she has 
eliminated little, hence her life is burdened and 
crushed. Life depends almost as much upon 
elimination as upon absorption. India needs a 
dynamic power to help her cleanse, to let go. 
The women of a lowly caste in Gujerat 


Upon each succeeding birthday add to ankles 
And to arms a ring of heavy brass until when age 


THE MOTIVE AND END 47 


Creeps on, weighted down through life with this 

Accumulation of the years, they totter to their 
tasks 

And then the burning ghat and the dreadful realms 
of Yama. 

Custom decrees it shall be so. 


Thus I saw our aged India weighted down with 
Accumulated custom and sapping superstition, 
With scarce strength left to lift herself 

To stand upright among the nations. 

She raised her eyes, weary, but spiritual still, 
Full upon me and seemed to say, 

“Adopted son of mine, if your love be true 
Loose from me these weights and set me free, 
For I would serve, but mind, my son, be gentle, 
For by long association they seem a part of me.” 


O, Master of my heart, give to me the touch of 
Gentle power that I may help to loose our Bharat, 
Mindful every moment how thy nail-pierced hand 
Didst gently loose my shackled soul 

From many a chain of lust and clinging selfishness 
And bade my happy soul be free. 


I believe that the dynamic that India needs is | 
Christ. Whom the Son makes free is free in- | 
deed. India needs a free, full life. And Christ — 
is Life. 

But more, the deepest need of the human heart 
East or West is God. The Indian people are the 
most God-stirred people on earth. But the im- 
pression I gather is that it is a stirring rather 
than a possession. 

The whole situation was summed up to me 


48 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


in this scene: I was sitting in the cool of a won- 
derful Indian evening with an old. philosopher. 
He was the finest type of India’s thinkers, deeply 
read in his own philosophy and acquainted with 
the philosophy of the West. The spell of the 
quietness and calm of the evening was upon us 
as we discussed the questions of God, life, and 
destiny. In the midst of the conversation he 
slowly stroked his beard and said, “I am that 
Ultimate Reality, but I do not know it yet.” 
As I sat there meditating upon his words I 
seemed to see before me India sitting and 
through the voice of the old man affirming, as 
she has affirmed through the centuries: “I am 
that Ultimate Reality,’ and adding, “but I do 
know it yet.” 

A few days later I saw him again. He was 
distressed and burdened. “My country is not 
free. She is divided and paralyzed. I can’t 
seem to see any hope.” Such was the burden of 
his plaint that day. His heart would respond 
to no other note. 

The next day I came again and he was radiant. 
“Oh,” he said, “My heart has been so happy to- 
day. All day long the prayer that gave 
us has been ringing through my mind, ‘Thou art 
our Father, teach us how to know thee as Father.’ 
Oh, that is it. I have peace to-day. That is 
what my country needs.” But before he was 





THE MOTIVE AND END 49 


through he added with a little touch of sadness 
in it, I thought: “If this will only stay. But it 
doesn’t seem to stay.” 

Do you get the picture? India affirms, “I am 
that Ultimate Reality,” but adds, “I do not know 
it yet,” and then, finding no foothold in or power 
from that Impersonal Essence termed Ultimate 
Reality, sinks into despair concerning the real 
world about her: “My country—is there any 
hope?” ‘Then there is the lighted-up moment 
when she sees a glimpse of the Father and ex- 
claims: “Oh, that is it. I have peace to-day. 
This is what my country needs,” and then plain- 
tively ends with the pathetic words, “It doesn’t 
seem to stay.” 

Just what is lacking there? Certainly not fine 
philosophic earnestness and spiritual receptivity. 
But when it comes down to the place of joyously 
getting hold, it eludes. Was there any need for 
Christ there? Could he do anything in that situ- 
ation? As India asks with Philip, “Show us the 
Father and it sufficeth us,” would he not stand 
and quietly say, “He that hath seen me hath seen 
the Father”? Would he not fix the fleeting vision 
of the Father and make it a permanent experi- 
ence of life? And out of that possession of the 
Father would there not grow the dynamic that 
would help one not to despair of conditions 
around one? Would not that lighted-up moment 


50 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


become a part of life itself? The innermost 
depths of my being cry out this is so! 

It is an actual fact of experience that when 
you deepen the Christ-consciousness you deepen 
the God-consciousness. Jesus does not push out 
or rival God; the more I know of him the more I 
know of the Father. I do not argue that, I sim- 
ply testify. 

Now, if any people on earth should have found 
God apart from Jesus Christ, the Indian people 
have earned that right. They have searched for 
God as no other nation on earth has ever searched 
for God. If sheer persistence of search could 
have found God in joyous clearness, then the 
Indian people have earned that right. 

But it is precisely this lack of the joyous sense 
of finding that strikes me as I go about India. 
“You are the boldest man I have ever seen,” 
said a Hindu after an address. “You said you 
had found God. I have never heard a man say 
that before.” There was no credit to me—not the 
slightest. I had looked into the face of Jesus 
and lo, I saw the Father! But India has not 
had that face to look into, and as a consequence 
the vision of the Father is fleeting. 

If this sounds dogmatic, then let India herself 
speak. My friend Holland gives this illuminat- 
ing incident: He had had a discussion with an 
able Hindu judge and the judge had got the bet- 


THE MOTIVE AND END 51 


ter of the argument, so he said in a kindly way: 
“Well, after all, there is not much difference be- 
tween us. You Christians are converted when 
you find God in Christ. We Hindus are con- 
verted when we find God in ourselves.” “With 
this difference,” replied Holland, “that in those 
countries where Christ is known conversions 
happen. I could take you to visit hundreds of 
my Christian friends in this city, Indian and 
English, and as you talked to them you would 
gather just this impression of light and dis- 
covery and inspiration of which we have been 
speaking, whereas I do not know of a single Hin- 
du student that gives me the impression he has 
found.” The judge’s face fell, his tone dropped 
and he said to Holland, quietly: “You are per- 
fectly right. I know more Hindus than you, 
Aryas, Brahmos, Theosophists and Orthodox; 
I do not know one who has found” (The Goal of 
India, Holland, p. 209). 

With the exception of one man who said he 
was a jiwan-mukta, that is, one who has found 
living salvation, a man whom the audience 
smiled upon and did not take seriously, I have 
found India God-stirred, but still seeking. There 
is not yet that sense of finding. 

But Jesus actually does give men just that. 
- More, he gives a goal for character and a free, 
full life. Is there anyone else who can give men 


¥ 


52 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


those three things? Is there anyone else actually 
doing it? 

I asked an earnest Hindu one day what he 
thought of Christ. He thoughtfully answered: 
“There is no one else who is seriously bidding 
for the heart of the world except Jesus Christ. 
There is no one else on the field.” 

Sweep the horizon—is there anyone else? 

Yes, Mrs. Besant announces a coming World 
Teacher. She puts forth Krishnamurti, a Brah- 
man youth who is to be the incarnation of 
Christ. (Even here she naively acknowledges the 
supremacy of Jesus, for it is to be an incarnation 
of Christ.) He has given forth his first install- 
ment of world teaching and has received divine 
honors in India and in the West. I had a long 
interview with him, found him of average intel- 
ligence, of rather lovable disposition, of mediocre 
Spiritual intuitions, and heard him swear in 
good round English! I came away feeling that 
if he is all we, as a race, have to look to in order 
to get out of the muddle we are in, then God pity 
us. 

There is literally no one else on the field and 
nothing else on the horizon. It is Christ or— 

nothing. Matthew Arnold says: “Try all the 
_ ways to peace and welfare you can think of and 
“ you will find that there is no way that brings you 


THE MOTIVE AND END 53 


to it except the way of Jesus. But this way does | 


bring you to it.” 

What, then, have we in Christianity that is 
not found in any of the other systems? I was 
asked by an ardent Arya Samajist that very 
question. “What have you in your religion that 
we haven’t in ours?” He expected me to argue 
with him the question concerning what moral 
ideas and philosophic principles we had that they 
did not have. I answered, “Shall I tell you in 
a word? You have no Christ.” Just there is 
the great lack of the non-Christian faiths. Fine 
things in their culture and thought—we admit 
it and thank God in real sincerity for them—but 
the real lack, the lack for which nothing else can 
atone, is just—Christ. They have no Christ. And 
lacking him, life lacks its supreme necessity. 

Sadhu Sunder Singh, the great Christian mys- 
tic, clarifies this in his conversation with a Euro- 
pean professor of comparative religions in a 
Hindu college. The professor was an agnostic 
as far as Christianity was concerned and inter- 
viewed the Sadhu with the evident intention of 
showing him his mistake in renouncing another 
faith for Christ. He asked, “What have you 
found in Christianity that you did not have in 
your old religion?” 

The Sadhu answered, “I have Christ.” 


bi 


54 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


“Yes, I know,” the professor replied, a little 
impatiently, for he was hoping for a philosoph- 
ical argument, “but what particular principle 
of doctrine have you found that you did not have 
before?” 

The Sadhu replied, “The particular thing I 
have found is Christ.” 

Try as the professor might, he could not budge 
him from that position. He went away discom- 
fited—and thoughtful. The Sadhu was right. 
The non-Christian faiths have fine things in 
them, but they lack—Christ. 

But someone objects: “Aren’t they getting 
along pretty well without Christ?” My answer 
is that I know of no one, East or West, who is 
getting along pretty well without Christ. Christ 
being Life is a necessity to life. 

A Brahman came to me confidentially one day 
and said, “Your addresses have been very much 
enjoyed, but there is one thing I would suggest. 
If you will preach Christ as a way, all right, but 
say that there may be other ways as well. If 
you do this, India will be at your feet.” I re- 
plied, thanking my brother for his concern, but 
said: “I am not looking for popularity, and it is 
not a question what I should say. It is a ques- 
tion of what are the facts. They have the final 
word.” I should be glad, more than glad, if I 


THE MOTIVE AND END 55 


could say that there are others who are saving 
men, but I know of only One to whom I dare 
actually apply the term “Saviour.” But I do 
dare apply it to Christ unreservedly and without 
qualification. A Hindu said to me one day, “You 
are such a broad-minded Christian.” I replied: 
“My brother, I am the narrowest man you have 
come across. I am broad on almost anything 
else, but the one supreme necessity for human 
nature I am absolutely narrowed by the facts to 
one—Jesus.” It is precisely because we believe 
in the absoluteness of Jesus that we can afford 
to take the more generous view of the non-Chris- 
tian systems and situations. But the facts have 
driven us to Jesus as the supreme necessity for 
all life everywhere. 

We disclaim, then, that this is international 
meddling. There is no more meddling in this 
than when Copernicus discovered a _ center 
around which our planet revolved and shared his 
discovery. It caused upset and heart-burnings 
to many who thought the geocentric view was 
sacrosanct. We now see that the disorderliness 
caused by this announcement was nothing com- 
pared to the vast and incurable disorderliness 
which was everywhere when men were thinking 
away from the center. We announced that we be- 
lieve that we have discovered the center of this 


56 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


moral and spiritual universe—the person of 
Jesus. That causes confusion and upset. But 
when men once find that center they find that an 
orderly spiritual universe comes out of chaos. 
But we do not impose it upon men, we share it 
with them. 

We also repudiate the idea of gaining mere 
members; we want character, and if there is any 
feverishness in our effort, it is that we are fever- 
ishly trying to set our own house in order. We 
need it as much as anyone else. 

As for the satisfying a racial superiority com- 
plex and being the forerunners of imperialism 
and capitalism, let us say that Jesus is the one 
Figure that stands blocking every road of polit- 
ical and economic exploitation in the East. He 
is troubling exploiters everywhere. He has got 
hold of them. They cannot grab and exploit with 
quite so easy a conscience as they once did. More- 
over, amid the racial clashes and bitterness there 
stands one who is the Son of man. Racialism 
withers under his real touch. He is the Friend 
of men. 

When we are told that India produces her 
great men, Gandhi and Tagore, and that it is 
therefore impertinent to go to the East, we reply 
thanking God for the greatness of these sons of 
India; we are proud of them and grateful for 


THE MOTIVE AND END dT 


them, and grateful also for the part that Jesus 
is having in molding them in greatness. 

As for the “Great Commission” being an in- 
terpolation, we reply that this has not yet been 
proved; but even if it were, we would still be 
committed to this whole enterprise of sharing 
him with the world, for it is not based on a com- 
mand, but upon the very nature of the gospel 
itself, upon him. Last command or no last com- 
mand, we must share him, for the necessities of 
human life command us to give a Saviour such 
as Jesus. Out of the deep necessities comes the 
imperious voice, “Go into all the world and 
preach the gospel.” If we hold our peace, the 
stones—the hard, bare facts of life—will cry out. 

Further. He and the facts not only command 
us to go, but he, standing in the East, beckons 
us tocome. He is there, deeply there, before us. 
We not only take him; we go to him. Of this 
vivid and tragic truth, he gives us a vision in 
that glimpse of the last day: “I was an hun- 
gered, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and 
ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took 
me in; naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and 
ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto 
me.” The righteous cry, “Lord, when saw we 
thee an hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and 
gave thee drink?” The amazing words fall from 


58 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


his lips “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one 
of the least of these. . . ye have done it unto 
me.’ Whom do we feed when we feed the hungry 
of India? That pinched man before me? Yes 
and more—our own Christ is hungry in that man. 
And when I put the chalice to the parched lips 
of India—to whose lips do I put it? That man 
athirst before me? Yea, more, for my own Christ 
is again athirst in him. I do not have to take 
Christ to India—he is there in the perpetual in- 
carnation of human need. When we do it to them 
we do it to him. “This whole question is vascu- 
lar: cut it anywhere and it will bleed.” 

If Christ is in this, I do not see how we can be 
out of it. 

To sum up: We are there because Christlike 
character is the highest that we know, because he 
makes the offer of a complete moral and spiritual 
change; he gives men a free, full life, and, most 
important of all, he gives them God. And we do 
not know of anyone else who does these things 
except Christ. But he does. 

And to the heart that has learned to love him 
it is irresistible to think of him hungry, thirsty, 
sick, in prison, naked and a stranger in the 
throbbing needs of our brother men. 

We take them Christ—we go to him. He is 
the motive and the end. 


CHAPTER III 


THE GROWING MORAL AND SPIRITUAL 
SUPREMACY OF JESUS 


Many who have looked for the Kingdom to 
come only by observation so that they could say 
“Lo, here,” and “Lo, there,’ have been disap- 
pointed to find it come so slowly, but the more 
discerning have suddenly awakened to find that 
the Kingdom was in the midst of them and all 
around them. Christianity is actually breaking 
out beyond the borders of the Christian Church 
and is being seen in most unexpected places. If 
those who have not the spirit of Jesus are none 
of his, no matter what outward symbols they pos- 
sess, then conversely those who have the spirit 
of Jesus are his, no matter what outward sym- 
bols they may lack. Ina spiritual movement like 
that of Jesus it is difficult and impossible to mark 
its frontiers. Statistics and classifications lose 
their meaning and are impotent to tell who are 
in and who are not. Jesus told us it would be so. 

He said that the Kingdom would come in two 
great ways: It would be like a grain of mustard 
seed, a tiny thing that grows into a great tree: 
this speaks of the outward growth of Christianity 

59 


60 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


—men coming into the organized expression of 
the Kingdom, namely, the Christian Church. 
Again, it would be like leaven which would 
silently permeate the whole: this tells of the 
silent permeation of the minds and hearts of men 
by Christian truth and thought until, from with- 
in, but scarcely knowing what is happening, the 
spirit and outlook of men would be silently leay- 
ened by the spirit of Jesus—they would be Chris- 
tianized from within. 

We see these two things taking place with the 
impact of Christ upon the soul of the East. 

We need not stop long at the first, though the 
growth by that method has been very consider- 
able. In the last ten years the population has 
increased by 1.2 per cent, but the growth of the 
Christian Church has been 22.6 per cent. We 
have added about 100,000 souls to the Christian 
Church every year for the last ten years—about 
a million in ten years. These have been largely 
from the outcaste sections of society. There are 
60,000,000 who are untouchables. These untouch- 
ables, who have lived on the edges of life, de- 
graded and despised, are being stirred with new 
virile thinking. Hitherto they have been op- 
pressed and have opened not their mouths. But 
not so now. They are catching from the high- 
caste leaders of the Nationalist Movement (beau- 
tiful irony!) the possibilities of passive resistance 


THE SUPREMACY OF JESUS 61 


and are turning it against the Brahmans them- 
selves. Last March a year ago began a struggle 
in South India that has had nation-wide conse- 
quences. Some of these untouchables appeared 
on a forbidden road in Travancore, the most 
caste-ridden section of India. They were 
promptly sent off to jail. The next day there was 
another group there ready to be sent off. That 
struggle has been going on for over a year. They 
go to jail, serve their sentence, and then quietly 
come back and sit upon the forbidden road—and 
India has an amazing power to sit! The sight of 
these silent, patient, passive resisters has shaken 
the caste system to its foundation, and has so 
stirred the high castes that some of the more 
sympathetic spirits among them formed a pro- 
cession a thousand strong, walked on foot one 
hundred fifty miles, holding meetings to arouse 
sympathy as they went, and presented to her 
Highness the ruler of Travancore a petition ask- 
ing that all the roads be thrown open to the un- 
touchables. The latest word says that these low 
castes had won out and the roads had been 
thrown open. Patient suffering had won! 
These outcastes are on the move. They are 
debating far into the night in their caste coun- 
cils as to where they will find their spiritual 
destiny and destination. They are talking over 
the relative merits of Hinduism, Mohammed- 


62 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


anism, Buddhism (for Buddhism is being brought 
back into India from which it had been driven, 
in order, I presume, to provide a figure that is 
Indian to set over against the personality of 
Jesus) and Christianity. In the next ten or 
twenty years the spiritual destiny of a vast sec- 
tion of human kind will probably be settled. 
This quest of the outcaste is one of the most 
remarkable spiritual phenomena at the present 
time, for sixty million are on the move! 

But there is a more remarkable movement at 
the other end of society among the higher castes. 
The movement among the low castes is called the 
Mass Movement; this other movement I would 
call a mass movement in mind toward Christ as 
a Person. Do not misunderstand me, they are 
not knocking at the doors for baptism, nor are 
they enamored of our ecclesiastical systems or 
our Civilization, but there is an amazing turning 
in thought toward Christ. Now, “whatever gets 
your attention finally gets you,’ and I do not 
think I overstate or exaggerate when I say that 
Jesus is getting the attention of the finest minds 
and spirits in India—and he is getting them. 

If one asks for the evidence of this, I would 
find it difficult to put my finger upon it, for some 
of it is so subtle that one has to stand down 
amid these swirling currents of India’s life and 
feel a subtle change from bitterness and hate to 


THE SUPREMACY OF JESUS 63 


understanding sympathy and inward love and 
allegiance. I can only throw open little windows 
through things that may seem insignificant in 
themselves, but which may let one see into a 
larger situation. 

A few years ago I was talking to a devoted 
English missionary who was confused and dis- 
couraged about the national situation. She won- 
dered of what use it was to try any more to do 
Christian work in India since Britain had lost 
moral hold upon India. There was such bitter- 
ness everywhere, and she could feel it. We 
talked about the inner meaning of things and I 
told her of what I had seen. I shall never forget 
the look on her face as she said: “I see the 
light. Christ is bigger than my empire, and his 
kingdom may come either through it or in spite of 
it. I see light bursting through these clouds 
that have hung over me.” A little window had 
let her see a great light. 

Nine years ago in the National Congress at 
Poona a Hindu gentleman in addressing the Con- 
gress used the name of Christ. There was such 
an uproar and confusion that he had to sit down 
unable to finish his speech. That name of Christ 
stood for all that India hated, for he was identi- 
fied with empire and the foreign rulers. He had 
not yet become naturalized upon the Indian 
Road. But in the meantime a disassociation of 


64 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


Jesus from the West had been made, so that nine 
years later when that same National Congress 
met, the Hindu president in giving his presiden- 
tial address quoted great passages from the New 
Testament, took out bodily the account of the 
crucifixion of Jesus from John’s Gospel: there 
were some seventy references to Christ in that 
Congress. Mrs. Naidu, India’s able poetess and 
Nationalist, sent a poem to the Congress to be 
read, entitled, “By Love Serve One Another’— 
a Scripture quotation. 

Through the literature and addresses of India’s 
leaders phrases and sentences from the New Tes- 
tament run almost like a refrain. 

In one of the Provincial Congress addresses 
bse , the president, in the course of his 
address spoke of Mr. C. F. Andrews as “ that real 
Christian,” and added, “Would that there were 
more real Christians!” Incidentally, let it be 
said that the Hindus often refer to “C. F. A.” 
as standing for “Christ’s Faithful Apostle’—a 
beautiful tribute, and a true one. 

In a recent Congress meeting Mohammed Ah, 
the leader of the Mussulmans of India, in his 
presidential address spoke of Mahatma Gandhi 
as “that Christlike man.” Again and again Hin- 
dus rise in my meetings and ask if I do not think 
that Mahatma Gandhi is a Christlike man. I 
usually reply that I cordially differ with him ina 





THE SUPREMACY OF JESUS 65 


good many things, nevertheless do think in some 
things he is a very Christlike man indeed. I 
have had them reply that they would go much 
further: they believed that he was the incarna- 
tion of Christ. A Hindu gave utterance to the 
same thought when listening to a preacher 
preaching in the bazaar in North India on the 
second coming of Christ: “Why do you preach 
on the second coming of Christ? He has already 
come—he is here—Gandhi.” Blasphemy? That 
is not the point—the point is that Gandhi is their 
ideal, and they are identifying that ideal with 
Jesus. It is the gripping of the mind by the Jesus 
ideal. 

Even the Arya Samaj, which is our bitterest 
opponent and whose leader said in a recent 
speech, “You may forget your name, you may for- 
get your mother, but do not forget that the mis- 
sionaries are the enemies of your country and 
your civilization’—nevertheless, in a recent ed- 
itorial in their principal organ, the Vedic Maga- 
zine, they call Gandhi “This modern Christ.” 
Against the missionary, but unconsciously for his 
message—Christ ! 

In an article written by a Hindu in an extreme 
nationalist paper there occurred this sentence: 
“Calvary, where another great of the East has 
suffered martyrdom for the sins of the world, has 
to-day its counterpart in Yerravada, where our 


66 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


Mahatmaji suffers martyrdom for the thraldom 
of the world. Just as Calvary stands for the 
world sinners, so Yerravada stands for the 
world’s down-trodden.” Yerravada is the prison 
where Gandhi was imprisoned. It is not a ques- 
tion whether these are real parallels or not, the 
significant thing is that the Indian people are 
seeing them. 

I was talking to two of the followers of Mahat- 
ma Ghandi one day when I said, “My brothers, 
we must have unity between the Hindu and 
Mohammedan if our country is ever to be strong 
and free, but your Hindu-Mohammedan unity is 
based upon a wrong foundation. You have based 
it upon a religious pact, you should base it upon 
the unchanging fact that you are all Indians. 
Upon this basis you should come together. This 
other will not stand.” My Hindu friend replied, 
“But, Mr. Jones, isn’t it our Christian duty to 
help our Mohammedan brethren in their difficul- 
ties?” A Hindu talking about his Christian duty 
toward his Mohammedan brethren! 

In the Ashram’ at the atmosphere is one 
of beautiful courtesy and friendliness. A Par- 
see gentleman came into my little room there and 
placed some fiowers on my table. It was a beau- 
tiful bit of thoughtfulness. I said, ““My brother, 
that was very gracious of you. I thank you from 





1A place of religious retreat. 


THE SUPREMACY OF JESUS 67 


my heart for that.” “Oh, no,” he replied, “that 
was my Christian duty,” and then, catching him- 
self, he quickly added, “‘Yes, and also my Parsee 
duty.” But I wondered if the last portion was 
not a tribute he felt he must pay to past loyalties, 
rather like a waving salutation to a dying ideal 
in his mind? The thing that was gripping him— 
really gripping him—was that to be kindly and 
gracious was one’s Christian duty while he was 
still a Parsee—outwardly. 

Two of the leaders of India, one in the political 
and one in the social realm, were talking to a 
friend of mine when the social leader remarked, 
“Well, Dr. , it is very difficult for us to 
say where our Hinduism ends and where our 
Christianity begins!” Turning to the political 
leader he said, “Isn’t that so, 2?” He pon- 
dered a moment and then thoughtfully replied, 
“Yes, that is so.” Our Hinduism ends—our 
Christianity begins! 

At the close of one of my addresses on “Jesus 
and the Problems of the Day” the Hindu chair- 
man, a prominent social thinker, in his chair- 
man’s remarks said, “I suppose that the epitome 
of what the speaker has said is that the solution 
of the problems of the day depends upon the ap- 
plication of the mind and spirit of Jesus to those 
problems. Now, I am not a Christian, and you 
will be surprised to hear me say that I entirely 








68 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


agree with these conclusions.” He went almost 
immediately from our meeting to be the President 
of the All-India Social Conference, which deals 
with the pressing social problems of India’s life, 
and he went there with this underlying thought 
as to the solution of those problems. Another 
Hindu chairman put the matter in this way, “The 
problems of the day arise through the lack of the 
spirit of Jesus Christ in the affairs of men.” 

At question time in the sacred city of : 
the editor of the local non-cooperation paper, a 
brilliant Hindu, a graduate of Oxford University, 
sent in a long list of keen questions which I 
was doing my best to answer, when two members 
of the secret police, the spy-system of India, got 
up and went behind a pillar and were whispering 
together and were disturbing him in his listen- 
ing. ‘These men were no friends of the editor, 
for they had probably shadowed him quite a bit. 
To this they were adding this present incon- 
venience. He twisted in his seat quite a bit and 
was very ill at ease, and then finally, turning to 
a friend of mine alongside of him, said, “Mr. 
J , I feel most un-Christian toward those 
men!” Here was a Hindu talking about his un- 
Christian feelings toward the representatives of 
a Christian government! Mixed up, but illu- 
minating. 

In view of the above incidents, and many more 








THE SUPREMACY OF JESUS 69 


like them, I was not surprised to have a Hindu 
college principal say to me one day, “There is 
growing up in India a Christ-cult, entirely apart 
from the Christian Church, almost under its 
opposition. The leading ideas of that cult are 
love, service and self-sacrifice.” He did not mean 
that there was any gathering of this scattered 
thought into an organization called the Christ- 
cult. Things are not propagated in India by 
blocked-off organization as we carry them on in 
the West. The method of propagation has been 
by ideas catching from life to life and thus 
silently leavening the whole. And this permea- 
tion that is taking place is running true to the 
genius of the past, for in the past it was thus 
that the ideas of the great reformers like Rama- 
nuja and Shankara became dominant. This 
Christ-cult has become more like an atmosphere 
than an organization. 

But the tremendous question presses itself 
upon us: Will the present Christian Church be 
big enough, responsive enough, Christlike enough 
to be'the medium and organ through which Christ 
will come to India? For, mind you, Christianity 
is breaking out beyond the borders of the Chris- 
tian Church. Will the Christian Church be 
Christlike enough to be the moral and spiritual 
center of this overflowing Christianity? Or will 
many of the finest spirits and minds of India 


70 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


accept Christ as Lord and Master of their lives, 
but live their Christian lives apart from the 
Christian Church? I believe in the Christian 
Church with all my heart, and believe that in it 
has centered the finest moral and spiritual life 
of the world, but here is a new and amazing chal- 
lenge, for this outside Christianity is going 
straight to the heart of things and saying that to 
be a Christian is to be Christlike. This means 
nothing less than that ancient rituals and orders, 
and power at court and correctly stated doctrine 
avail little if Christlikeness is not the outstand- 
ing characteristic of the life of the people of the 
churches. If Christianity centers in the Chris- 
tian Church in the future, it will be because that 
church is the center of the Christ-spirit. This 
constitutes a challenge and a call. 

This whole chapter might be summed up in the 
statement of the Brahman who put his hand on 
my shoulder (and I am untouchable!) and said, 
“Sir, you perhaps become discouraged at the few 
who become Christians from the high castes. 
You need not be discouraged. You do not know 
how far your gospel has gone. Now, look at me. 
I am a Brahman, but I would call myself a 
Christian Brahman, for I am trying to live my 
life upon the principles and spirit of Jesus, 
though I may never come out and be an open 
follower of Jesus Christ, but I am following 


THE SUPREMACY OF JESUS 71 


him. Sir, don’t be discouraged, you do not know 
how far your gospel has gone.” 

I was not discouraged, my heart was singing 
to the music of things, for I saw my risen Lord 
entering behind closed doors once again and 
showing his hands and his side and speaking 
peace to disciples I had not known. 

As the physical atmosphere becomes heavy with 
moisture, so heavy that it is precipitated into 
rain, so the spiritual atmosphere of India is 
becoming heavy with interest in Jesus Christ 
and is on the verge of and is actually being pre- 
cipitated into Christian forms and Christian 
expression. I pray that the Christian Church 
may be the Christlike medium through which 
this spiritual precipitation may express itself. 

But one word of caution before closing this 
chapter. Do not misunderstand me. I am not 
satisfied with an interest in Jesus—I cannot 
be satisfied this side of allegiance—utter and 
absolute. But if you give me an inch in the soul 
of India, I will take it and appeal for that next 
inch until the whole soul of this great people 
is laid at the feet of the Son of God. 

Moreover, our final call to the world is not 
to love Christ, but to have faith in him. But 
since a nation is gradually won we will thank 
God for any stage on the way to the goal we can 
find. That final goal is faith in Christ. 


72 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


But He who was grateful for the cup of cold 
water given in his name, who accepted the super- 
stitious touch of a woman upon the border of 
his garment and let healing flow through that 
imperfect touch, who rejoiced in the faith of an 
outsider and said that he had not found so great 
faith in Israel, and gave him his heart’s desire, 
who would not break the bruised reed or quench 
the smoking fiax, who saw in a grateful woman’s 
anointing of his feet a meaning deeper than she 
saw, declaring it to have significance for his 
burial, who caught and responded to the cry of 
a penitent thief for remembrance, certainly will 
not despise this day of small but prophetic begin- 
nings and will bring these “other sheep who are 
not of this fold, that there may be one flock 
[R. V.] and one shepherd.” 


CHAPTER IV 


JESUS COMES THROUGH IRREGULAR 
CHANNELS—MAHATMA GANDHITS 
PART 


WHILE a Christian lecturer was commenting 
on this remarkable permeation of the atmosphere 
of India with the thought and spirit of Jesus, a 
Hindu turned and said to me, “Yes, but he failed 
to say that Mahatma Gandhi was responsible for 
a great deal of this new interest in Jesus.” I 
could only agree with him that the criticism was 
just. 

Mahatma Gandhi does not call himself a 
Christian. The fact is that he calls himself a 
Hindu. But by his life and outlook and methods 
he has been the medium through which a great 
deal of this interest in Christ has come. 

He saw clearly that there were two ways that 
India might gain her freedom. She might take 
the way of the sword and the bomb—the way that 
Mohammed Ali and Shankat Ali, the Moham- 
medan leaders, untamed by Gandhi, would have 
taken; and the way that the Bengal anarchists 
have actually taken. The fires of rebellion were 
underneath. The flash of a bomb here and there 

73 


74 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


let the world see in that lurid light what was 
there. Gandhi brought all this hidden discontent 
to the open. A member of the secret police told 
me that it was comparatively easy for them now 
since Gandhi’s advent, that they simply went to 
the Non-Cooperation Headquarters and asked 
what would be the next step in their program in 
the fight with the government and they told him 
just what they would do next. Gandhi turned 
the streams of discontent and rebellion into open 
and frank channels. 

He rejected both the sword and the bomb, not 
because it was expedient, but because he believed 
with all his soul in something else, in another 
type of power—soul force or the power of suffer- 
ing—and another type of victory—a victory over 
oneself, this inward victory being the precursor 
of the outward national victory. In the fires of 
that suffering there would come the inward free- 
dom, the purification of the social and political 
life from within. 

Now for the first time in human history a 
nation in the attainment of its national ends 
repudiated physical force and substituted the 
power of soul or soul force, and has made inward 
national regeneration a vital part of its program. 
This is certainly an infinitely more Christian 
way than we have ordinarily taken in the West. 
Had the Indian people really caught the ideal 


IRREGULAR CHANNELS 75 


on a national scale and put it into practice, as 
an inner circle caught and practiced it, they 
would have risen to almost unparalleled moral 
heights. As one English writer, who is not sup- 
posed to be sympathetic, put it, “Had India really 
practiced Gandhi’s program, no nation on earth 
could have denied to India the moral leadership 
of the world.” They would have shown us a way 
out of the vicious circle into which militarism 
has got us. They would have demonstrated what 
we all vaguely feel, that the final power of the 
world resides in soul. 

The daily Anglo-Indian paper, the Statesman, 
after bitterly fighting Gandhi and his movement, 
acknowledged in its editorial columns that 
Gandhi “had put sincerity into politics.” He 
did more: he put the cross into politics. 

The movement as a political movement failed, 
for violence crept into it. The movement failed, 
but it was not a failure. The immediate end was 
not accomplished, but it left a spiritual deposit 
in the mind of India that will never be lost. 

At the close of an address on “Gandhi” in 
America a man arose and asked why I talked 
on Gandhi and his movement when both of them 
were abject failures. I replied that I did so 
because I belonged to that other and greater 
Failure of human history—to the Man who began 
a kingdom with initial success and then it al} 


76 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


ended in a cross, a bitter and shameful Failure. 
But Golgotha’s failure was the world’s most 
amazing success. A recent dramatist made the 
centurion say to Mary as she stood by the cross: 
“T tell you, woman, that this dead Son of yours, 
disfigured, shamed, spat upon, has built this day 
a kingdom that can never die. The living glory 
of him rules it. The earth is his and he made it. 
He and his brothers have been molding and mak- 
ing it through the long ages; they are the only 
ones who ever did possess it; not the proud, not 
the idle, not the vaunting empires of the world. 
Something has happened on this hill to-day to 
shake all the kingdoms of blood and fear to dust. 
The earth is his, the earth is theirs and they 
made it. The meek, the terrible meek, the fierce 
agonizing meek are about to enter into their 
inheritance.” If the meek shall finally inherit 
earth, then Ghandi must get his portion, for he 
belongs to the meek, the terrible meek. 

Do not misunderstand me, I do not draw the 
parallels, thereby suggesting that these events 
are comparable in their effect upon human his- 
tory, but belonging to the Great Failure that 
meant world redemption, I am predisposed to 
understand a failure that may mean something 
bigger than political success for India—and 
beyond. 

Gandhi did not fail. The Indian people failed 


TRREGULAR CHANNELS cr 


Gandhi. It was their failure. But in apparent 
failure he really succeeded. I would rather 
think of him as Gandhi the defeated, but holding 
firm and with unsoured spirit to the belief that 
somehow, someway the power of his ideal must 
conquer, than to see Gandhi seated by some other 
method as the first president of the Indian 
Republic. We have plenty of presidents through- 
out the world. We have a new crop every elec- 
tion day. China has one every few months by 
the clicking of political and military machinery, 
but few outside China know their names; but 
the name of Gandhi haunts us, shocks us, appeals 
to us. If Gandhi should die right now in the 
moment of his most apparent failure, disagree 
with him as I do in many things, I would hold 
him to be the most successful man who has lived 
in East or West in the last ten years. I think 
history will bear that out. I would rather be 
a Wilson or a Gandhi defeated, but holding to 
ideals not yet accepted, than to be a Clémenceau, 
the tiger, standing victorious over a fallen foe. 

Gandhi’s movement in its failure left a new 
Spiritual deposit in the mind of India. The cross 
has become intelligible and vital. Up to a few 
years ago one was preaching against a stone wall 
in preaching the cross in India. The whole 
underlying philosophy of things was against it. 
The doctrine of Karma, as ordinarily held, has 


78 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


little or no room for the cross in it. According 
to it, you are being meted out, to the last jot and 
tittle, the results of your actions in a previous 
birth. Everything is held in the iron grip of that 
law of rewards and punishments. If you help 
a man it is because his Karma calls for that help; 
if you hurt him, it is for the same reason. All 
suffering is punitive and the result of previous 
sin. This thought prompted a man to ask me 
in one of my meetings “if Jesus must not have 
been a very wicked man in a previous birth, since 
he was such a terrible sufferer in this one.” This 
was a view consistent with the doctrine. There 
is little or no room for vicarious suffering for 
others. 

But with this teaching of Gandhi that they can 
joyously take on themselves suffering for the sake 
of national ends, there has come into the atmos- 
phere a new sensitiveness to the cross. A bril- 
liant Hindu thinker, writing on this subject, 
said, “What the missionaries have not been able 
to do in fifty years Gandhi by his life and trial 
and incarceration has done, namely, he has 
turned the eyes of India toward the cross.” I 
am a missionary, and you would expect that to 
make us missionaries wince a bit, but it does not. 
We do not mind who gets the credit. We are not 
there for credit, but for reality. We desire so 
desperately that India and the world may see the 


IRREGULAR CHANNELS 79 


cross that we rejoice if anyone, even one outside 
our fold, helps India see that cross. To-day in 
India you can step up from this nationalist think- 
ing straight to the heart of the cross. It is the 
message that goes through with power. 

Even a Mohammedan editor caught the inner 
meaning of things—and it is difficult for Moham- 
medans who have other ideas of power—and 
expressed it in an editorial thus: “From the 
mere standpoint of strategy it is infinitely better 
-for the missionaries to depend upon the cross 
and its meaning of self-sacrifice than upon all 
the empires and their backing.” 

This little window lets us see a good deal: In 
a nationalist paper at the time of great national 
excitement there appeared this flaming headline, 
“A Dreadful Night of Crucifixion.” I read 
through the account with eagerness to see what 
had happened. It was a vivid account of how 
Akali Sikhs, resisters, were severely beaten by 
the police. It ended with this sentence: “Gentle 
reader, on that dreadful night Christ was again 
crucified.” This was written by a Hindu for 
Hindus and Mohammedans, but they had caught 
the idea that Christ was identified in some mys- 
terious way with the pain and suffering and 
oppression of men. Whether the text taken will 
bear the burden of the meaning given to it is not 
the question; the idea lives on even after the 


80 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


event to which it is applied passes away. That 
idea is that Christ suffers in the suffering of men. 

A nationalist put the matter to me this way: 
“It is you Christians who can understand the 
inner meaning of our movement better than 
others, for it has a kinship to the underlying 
thought of Christianity.” The man who said 
this was a man of beautiful character and was 
acting upon that inner meaning. One national- 
ist asked me, “Do you not think that the Non- 
Cooperation movement is an application of the 
principles of Jesus to the present political situa- 
tion?” 

Some of the Hindus have been concerned about 
this too definitely Christian aspect of things. 
One of them asked in my meeting, “Just as the 
British government conquered India through the 
sons of the soil, that is, through Indian troops, 
aren’t you trying to conquer India for Chris- 
tianity in the same way, namely, by using a son 
of the soil, Gandhi?” Of course this was pre- 
posterous, for Gandhi is the last man on earth 
who can be “handled”; but the point is that the 
questioner saw the Christian drift of things. 

In one of the important conferences when the 
nationalist leaders were discussing this question 
of procedure a Hindu nationalist said, “I oppose 
this non-violent non-cooperation. I ask you is it 
Hindu teaching? It is not. Is it Mohammedan 


IRREGULAR CHANNELS 81 


teaching? It is not. I will tell you what it is, 
it is Christian teaching. I therefore oppose it.” 

Even among the ordinary villages his drift 
is noted. At the missionaries had been 
bitterly opposed by the Hindus in their preach- 
ing at a mela, a religious fair. But this year of 
which I speak the Hindus came and helped them, 
saying, “We are allies now, since Mahatma 
Gandhi is following Christ.” The question of 
whether he would say he is or not is not the 
paramount thing—the point is that the villagers 
saw the inner relationship of things. 

This viewpoint of the villagers is not to be 
wondered at when an instance like this occurs: 
On the arrival of the train the great crowd gath- 
ered for a speech. Gandhi came out, took out a 
New Testament and read the Beatitudes and then 
finished by saying: “That is my address to you. 
Act upon that.” That was all the speech he gave. 
But it spoke volumes. 

In one place the nationalists were forbidden 
by the government to carry the national flag 
beyond a certain point on a bridge which led 
into the European or Civil section of the town. 
The nationalists made it an issue. The magis- 
trate, who arrested and tried most of them, re- 
marked to me that those whom he arrested were 
much more Christian in their spirit than he was. 
They would let him know what time they were 





82 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


coming across the bridge with the flag and how 
many! Would he please be prepared for twenty- 
five to-day. Of the twelve hundred who were 
arrested in that flag agitation, although none of 
them were professed Christians, and although 
they could take into jail with them only a limited 
number of things which they had to produce 
before the magistrate, the vast majority took New 
Testaments with them to read while there. The 
reason they did’ so becomes apparent when one 
of them remarked, “We now know what it means 
for you Christians to suffer for Christ.” The cross 
had become not a doctrine, but a living thing. 

Sometimes things took a rather amusing, if 
not ludicrous turn, as when a Hindu nationalist 
who was being tried by a British judge, began 
his defense with these words, “And they shall 
deliver you up before kings and governors and 
magistrates for my name’s sake,” and ended up 
his statement with the words, “Father, forgive 
them, they know not what they do!” 

But the real force of it strikes one when Ghandi 
himself exemplifies it. He is ready to apply this 
principle of conquering by soul force not merely 
against the British government, but against his 
own people as well, when he feels they are in the 
wrong. This, of course, would have little or no 
effect were not Gandhi the soul of sincerity and 
utterly fearless. 


IRREGULAR CHANNELS 83 


When in South Africa carrying on his passive 
resistance movement against the South African 
government (which struggle, by the way, he won) 
the indentured coolies in whose behalf he was 
fighting with non-violent weapons, got out of 
hand again and again. He remonstrated, but all 
to no avail. Finally without word he went off 
and began to fast. He had fasted for two days 
when word went around among the coolies that 
Gandhi was fasting because of what they were 
doing. That changed matters immediately. 
They came to him with folded hands and begged 
him to desist from the fast, promising him that 
they would do anything if only he would stop it. 
Suffering love had conquered. 

In his ashram one of the boys told him some- 
thing that he believed but later found out that 
the boy had led to him. Gandhi called the 
school together and solemnly said, “Boys, I am 
sorry to find out that one of you is a liar. As 
punishment I am going off and fast to-day.” 
That may be passed with a smile, but not if you 
knew the dead earnestness of Gandhi and the 
sheer moral weight of the man. There could not 
have been a more terrific punishment, for long 
after any physical pain from physical punish- 
ment would have died away there would persist 
the spiritual pain from the lashings of conscience 
awakened by the sufferings of the man who loved 


84 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


him. In the light of Gandhi’s acting thus it 
becomes easy for them to step up from the 
thought that if one man would take on him- 
self suffering to bring a boy baek from a lie to 
the truth, then if there were One divine enough 
and holy enough, he might take on his soul the 
very sin of a whole race to bring us back to 
good and to God. The cross thus bursts into 
meaning when lighted up by this lesser act. 

This is all the more vividly seen in Gandhi's 
recent fast of twenty-one days. A fast of that 
length of time is serious when we recall that 
Gandhi had not really recovered from his opera- 
tion and that he ordinarily weighs less than a 
hundred pounds. But when he came out of jail 
he found the Hindus and Mohammedans suspi- 
cious, jealous, and divided. Before his arrest 
they had become united in his person, but when 
he was taken away and put in jail they fell apart. 
He knew that the moment India was united that 
moment India was free. He pleaded and remon- 
strated, but the divisions persisted and became 
acute. Out of sheer sorrow of heart he announced 
that he would undergo, as a penance, a fast of 
twenty-one days. 

It touched India to the quick, for they are an 
emotionally responsive people. They called a 
Unity Conference on the tenth day of his fast. It 
was composed of representatives of the various 


IRREGULAR CHANNELS 85 


religions of India, including the Metropolitan, 
the head of the Church of England in India. 
They debated back and forth the questions at 
issue. Though Gandhi was lying in weakness 
upon his couch in another part of the city, his 
spirit pressed upon them in the conference for a 
solution. They passed resolutions covering their 
points of difference and appointed a commission 
of twenty-five as a Permanent Board of Adjudi- 
cation on intercommunal matters. But the most 
remarkable resolution was the one in which they 
stated that “We recognize the right of an indi- 
vidual to change his faith at will, provided no 
inducement is offered to effect that change, such 
as the offering of material gain,” and, further, 
“We also recognize the right of that individual 
not to suffer persecution from the community 
which he may leave.” When one remembers that 
in Islam apostasy meant death, and in Hinduism 
social death, then this resolution marks a 
national epoch and is really a National Declara- 
tion of Religious Freedom. The silent pressure 
of the spirit of Gandhi was doing its work. And 
Gandhi’s spirit was being pressed upon by the 
Spirit of Jesus. 

On the eighteenth day of the fast, Mr. C. F. 
Andrews, who was editing Gandhi’s paper, Young 
India, while he was fasting, wrote an editorial 
in which he described Gandhi lying upon his 


86 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


couch on the upper veranda in Delhi, weak and 
emaciated. He pictured the fort which could be 
seen in the distance, reminding them of the 
struggle for the possession of the kingdom; below 
the fort Englishmen could be seen going out to 
their golf; nearer at hand the crowds of his own 
people surged through the bazaar intent on buy- 
ing and selling. While Andrews watched him 
there that verse of Scripture rushed to his mind: 
“Ts it nothing to you, ye that pass by? Is there 
any sorrow like unto my sorrow?” He ended it 
with this sentence: “As I looked upon him there 
and caught the meaning of it all, I felt as never 
before in my own experience the meaning of the 
cross.” 

Andrews spoke out in these last sentences the 
very thought of the heart of India. India has 
seen the meaning of the cross in one of her sons. 
As a former fiery opponent of Christianity, a 
nationalist leader, said, “I never understood the 
meaning of Christianity until I saw it in Gan- 
dhi.” While this inspires us and we are deeply 
grateful for it, nevertheless, it is a sword that 
cuts two ways, for some of us have been there 
these years and deeply regret that Christianity 
did not burst into meaning through us. How- 
ever, we are glad that India is seeing. And let 
it be quietly said that we too are seeing. 


CHAPTER V 


THROUGH THE REGULAR CHANNELS— 
SOME EVANGELISTIC SERIES 


THE picture given in the preceding chapter 
must be corrected a bit, for while Gandhi has 
had a good deal to do with popularizing the la- 
tent sentiment lying in the soul of India, never- 
theless it has been the missionaries and their as- 
sociates who through these decades have, by their 
fine living and self-sacrifice and constant teach- 
ing, laid up this sentiment in the heart of India. 
I have constantly felt my own debt of gratitude 
as I have gone from place to place entering into 
other people’s labors. They sowed where I was 
privileged to reap. It was they who have had 
the harder part. 

Some time ago I got hold of a phrase that has 
been of incalculable value to me: “Evangelize the * 
inevitable.” Certain things are inevitable: no 
use to grumble against them—get into them and 
evangelize them. The labor movement through- 
out the world is inevitable. In England they 
more or less evangelized it so that it is very 
Christian in its spirit and outlook. We failed 
to do that in America so that the movement some- 

87 


88 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


times fell into the hands of men who were anti- 
Christian. This has been of incalculable loss. 
Some years ago I saw that the Nationalist Move- 
ment in India was inevitable. You could not 
scatter as much education and Christian teach- 
ing through India without there being an upris- 
ing of soul demanding self-expression and self- 
control. It is as inevitable as the dawn. We 
would have felt that we had failed if this had 
not come. When I saw the inevitableness of it I 
felt there was only one thing to be done—get 
into the movement and evangelize it. Stand 
down in those national currents and put Christ 
there. 

That does not mean that we should get into 
the politics of the country and become politicians, 
but it does mean that the Indian Nationalist 
Senses at once that we are in spiritual sympathy 
with the finest and best in his movement. That 
is all he asks for, but he does ask for that. 

When I began this work nine years ago it was 
in a small way, hoping that this most difficult 
field would open. I have had no plans that I 
was not ready to scrap, if they did not seem to be 
vital, or did not work. There was one concern 
and one only: how could I help India to see in 
Jesus what I saw. Anything that ministered to 
that I wanted, anything that did not could go. 

Since the Methodist Board took charge of my 


REGULAR CHANNELS 89 


expenses and then gave me perfect freedom to 
work among all the different missions of India, 
I have covered several times the more important 
centers and many smaller ones. 

We have had as chairmen of our meetings 
members of Legislative Councils, judges, law: 
yers, generals, college presidents, professors, and 
leading Hindus and Mohammedans of every 
type. We have had the meetings in the open 
spaces in the cool of the evenings, in Town Halls, 
Hindu and Christian college auditoriums, Theo- 
sophical Society halls and even in Hindu temple 
compounds. The reader will probably note that 
I have omitted Christian churches from this list. 
There is a real prejudice against them, so we 
seldom or never have meetings for Hindus and 
Mohammedans in them. 

We have felt that we must hit the problem in 
two places: The church must be spiritualized 
and the non-Christian won to Christ. We have 
morning meetings for the Christians and night 
meetings for the non-Christians. These are tied 
together in purpose, for we know that we can- 
not spiritualize the church apart from its tasks. 
Experience and expression are the two sides of 
the Christian life, and one cannot exist without 
the other. Kill either and you kill both. So we 
have tried to get the church to realize its joyous 
privilege of soul-winning. 


90 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


One task along this line has been to help arouse 
the Syrian Church in South India—a church of 
five hundred thousand that has been dead for 
centuries. They are now beginning to be keen 
and alive and the largest Christian audience in 
the world gathers at the time of the yearly con- 
vention, when in a single audience there will be 
thirty-five thousand people. These conventions 
have been marked with great spiritual power, and 
the church is now beginning to take its place in 
the evangelization of India. 

In the meetings for non-Christians there have 
been large crowds in many places, and although 
it has been the most upset period of India’s 
recent history, yet we have not had the slightest 
disturbance of any kind in any single meeting in 
nine years. India has shown a beautiful cour- 
tesy and has treated me as a friend and brother, 
and I have tried to respond. 

I said there had been no disturbance, but there 
was one on one occasion, but that was based on 
a misunderstanding. The Non-Cooperators, the 
extreme Nationalists, saw the officials of the city 
going into our meeting and thought we were hav- 
ing a pro-government meeting. They surrounded 
the building, stoned it, rushed the doors and 
yelled their national yells for three quarters of 
an hour. I requested some men to hold the doors, 
and above the din and noise I talked on brother- 


REGULAR CHANNELS 91 


hood and good will and the coming of the King- 
dom, while the storm raged on the outside. It 
was a lovely time to talk about it! But the 
next day when the Non-Cooperators found out 
what kind of a meeting we were having they came 
and personally apologized, and said that they 
themselves would attend the rest of the meet- 
ings. They did so, and one of them, on the last 
night of the meeting, dressed in his simple white 
homespun, the sign of the Nationalist, arose and 
read a paper thanking me for what I had said 
to them about Christ. That was the nearest 
to a disturbance we had had in nine years. The 
gentle courtesy of the East is a beautiful thing. 
For instance, after speaking for a number of 
nights in a Theosophical Society hall it was a 
fine courtesy for the secretary of the Society to 
garland me publicly, though everything I had 
said cut straight-across the ideas of theosophy: 

In view of what I have said above the criticism 
of Bernard Lucas is just when he remarks, 
“We have attempted the task of winning India 
for Christ as though it were a country of bar- 
barians, whereas it is a country of cultured and 
civilized people with a submerged tenth of bar- 
barians.” It is usually about that submerged 
tenth that we hear in our general missionary 
talks, which taken alone can hardly be called a 
fair representation of the situation. At the same 


92 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


time, I realize that my presentation needs the 
balance of the other facts. 

I know when [I stand before an audience of 
Hindus and Mohammedans that they are in- 
wardly challenging every word I utter and every 
thought I express; and I know if I gain an inch 
in their souls, I will have to fight for it, but all 
the time there is courtesy and friendliness, even 
in moments of deepest disagreement. Such 
treatment can fairly be claimed to indicate cul- 
ture. 

Now for a few glimpses into some of the evan- 
gelistic series. I select these out of the hun- 
dreds we have had throughout India. 

We went into the great city of It was 
an exceedingly difficult proposition, for there 
was a great university there which was supposed 
to propagate Hindu culture and religion. On the 
other hand the city was held in the grip of an- 
cient thought and many a superstition. But 
we were amazed and delighted to find that the 
president of the university graciously consented 
to become chairman of one of our meetings. 
There were large crowds each night. At the 
close of the meeting one night the students of the 
university came and asked me to come over to 
speak at the university. I was surprised beyond 
measure and said, “My brothers, you don’t want 
me over there?” 





REGULAR CHANNELS 93 


“Oh, yes, we do,” they replied. 

But I pressed a little further: “Do your pro- 
fessors know about it?” “Yes,” they said, “they 
want you to come.” 

“But,” I still persisted, “what do you want 
me to speak about?” 

One of them answered and said, “If you don’t 
mind, we would like you to speak about Christ.” 

Well, I assure you, I didn’t mind! 

Another spoke up and said, “We would like 
you to speak especially about the cross.” I like 
to speak especially about the cross! I went over 
several times, and on the first occasion was 
introduced by the Hindu chairman, a professor, 
in these words. “I have been attending the pub- 
lic meetings, but I haven’t been interested in the 
speaker as much as I have been interested in 
the Person concerning whom he has been speak- 
ing. Young men, no such personality as that of 
Jesus has ever appeared in human history. He 
is the greatest character that has ever been 
in our world. Now, to-day is a Hindu festival, 
and we can begin the festival in no better way 
than to hear again about this Person.” The 
striking thing was that I could see no sign of 
resentment on the faces of the students. Know- 
ing the bitterness and prejudices of the past, 
I could scarcely believe my ears, for we were at 
the heart of orthodoxy. 


94 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


In the same place I was invited by the Theos- 
ophists to speak to them in their hall. At the 
close their leader said, ‘‘We may not agree with 
what Mr. Jones is saying, but we can certainly 
all try to be like Jesus Christ’”—which is a good 
deal! 

In the meetings were in the Town Hall. 
The next to the last night of the series the lead- 
ers of the Non-Cooperation movement in that 
place publicly presented a request at the close. 
They said that the next day was the anniversary 
of Mahatma Gandhi’s going to jail and it was 
their big day, that they were going to have a 
great meeting of ten thousand or more on the 
public commons, and they had come to ask us 
to put these two meetings together. They asked 
me to speak on the same topic announced for 
that next night and said they would furnish an 
interpreter. I strongly desired to go, for it was 
such a gracious invitation and meant so much, 
for it was their greatest political gathering and 
they wanted me to give a Christian address! But 
the next night I wanted to give an invitation for 
personal allegiance to Christ. Very reluctantly 
I had to decline their invitation. Notwithstand- 
ing the fact that the other meeting was going 
on at the same time, our meeting was packed to 
its capacity. At the close of the address I did 
what I have only dared to do this last year. I 





REGULAR CHANNELS 95 


asked these leading high-caste men to take their 
stand publicly for Christ. I told them frankly 
that I would leave the question of baptism and 
the Christian Church to their consciences, that 
I would give them my own view, namely, that I 
believed that inwardly and outwardly one should 
belong to Christ, but, having said that, I would 
leave the matter to their consciences as they read. 
The New Testament, and in its light decided 
what they should do. But I urged that here and 
now they should make Jesus the Lord and 
Saviour of their lives. On that proposition be- 
tween thirty and forty of the leading citizens, 
lawyers, doctors, and so on, stayed. That after- 
meeting in which we prayed and instructed them 
and had them repeat a prayer of confession and 
surrender to Christ after me, was one long to be 
remembered, for the melting sense of God that 
was upon Us. 

We have had some of our meetings in some 
very remarkable places. In we had them 
in the palace of Tippu Sultan, the old Moham- 
medan king and tyrant. I stood right under the 
throne when I spoke. It made a splendid sound- 
ing board in more ways than one. The last night 
I asked those who would give themselves to 
Christ to meet me in a little room in the rear. It 
filled up with seeking Hindus—some of them in 
earnest—a few who had come to challenge and 





96 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


quibble. I found out later that the room was the 
place where two British generals had been 
chained to their guards as prisoners of the ty- 
rant. One of them was named Sid David Baird. 
When word went to his old mother in Scotland 
about her son, the dour old lady, knowing her 
boy, said, “Well, God have mercy on the poor 
chap that is chained to our Davy!” But in the 
very room where men had been chained to their 
guards as prisoners Christ was making men free, 
and in the palace hall where an autocrat had sat 
with a kingdom founded upon a bloody sword 
we were announcing a new kingdom founded not 
upon the sword, but upon the very self-giving of 
the Son of God at Golgotha. 

At one place a non-Christian literary society 
asked to have the meetings under their auspices 
and charge. A non-Christian literary society 
having charge of Christian evangelistic meetings! 
Incongruous, but glorious! They secured the 
Maharaja’s theater for the addresses. They said 
they were going to get the prince as the chair- 
man of the meeting the first night. They naively 
suggested that he was hard hit by drink, but 
they thought they could keep him sufficiently 
sober to be chairman that night! We cannot be 
squeamish about those things, we have to take 
what we get, glad to put out our gospel in any 
situation we can, and since we thought the prince 


REGULAR CHANNELS 97 


needed it, we were very glad to have him come. 
The prime minister was the chairman the second 
night and on down the line to lesser officials. 
There were about a thousand of the officials of 
that leading native state present each night. It 
was literally like witnessing before kings and 
governors for His name’s sake. When the prince 
arose for his chairman’s remarks everyone was 
rather nervous as to what he would say, for he 
was rather a free lance, and said about what he 
wanted to say. He kept up his reputation for 
surprises by saying, “I do not understand why 
the speaker has gone so far off to talk about 
corruption in government; he needn’t have gone 
to China to talk about corrupt officials; he 
could have come right here.” Every official 
jumped as though he had been shot. Just then 
his secretary, who was an influential man in the 
state, and who was on the platform with us, 
hurriedly passed over a note to the prince. He 
read it and then announced, “My secretary says 
I need not say anything more!” 

He invited me to come over to see him at the 
palace the next day. I went. I begged him to 
give up drink and give himself to Christ, told 
him what Christ had done for me. He said, “Mr. 
Jones, I can’t do it. The fact is that I was 
almost a Christian when I first went to Eng- 
land, for Christianity appealed to me because of 


98 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


its sense of brotherhood; but I was educated 
there with Macaulay in one hand and a whisky 
bottle in the other. But I will make you this 
promise. I am going to America, and since you 
have prohibition in America I won’t be able to 
get it then, so I will give it up when I go there.” 
The whole world is bending over in expectancy 
to see what we are going to do with this matter 
of prohibition. If we should fail, it would set 
back the clock of moral progress for fifty or a 
hundred years. We must not fail. Thus does 
evangelistic work in the Orient depend upon con- 
ditions at home. 

Nine years ago Dr. John R. Mott was speak- 
ing in the fine hall at to a non-Christian 
audience. In the midst of his address he used 
the name of Christ and the audience hissed him. 
Nine years later we were in that hall with one 
topic for six nights—“Jesus Christ and Him 
Crucified.” The audience increased every night 
until the last nights they were standing around 
the doors and windows. Il gave the invitation 
to those who would surrender themselves to 
Christ, leaving the question of baptism to their 
own inner convictions, to come and take the front 
seats. I felt at the time that if one would come 
I should be grateful, for William Carey had said 
that if one of these high-castes should ever be 
converted, it would be as great a miracle as the 





REGULAR CHANNELS 99 


raising of the dead. But that night between a 
hundred and a hundred and fifty came forward 
on that proposal. Cut it down to its lowest pos- 
sible significance, and yet we have left the resid- 
ual fact that in the hall where the name of 
Christ had been hissed nine years before men now 
stayed to pray in that same name. It was not 
the difference in the speakers, for everything was 
in favor of the first speaker; it was the difference 
in the attitude of India toward Jesus in the 
meantime. “The psychological climate” has 
changed. It was a new day. 

In this same city I was invited to speak in 
a non-Christian college, and the students gave 
up a cricket match in order to attend. In another 
place the Hindu students wanted an extra meet- 
ing for themselves. We could find no time, for 
I was speaking four times a day. They finally 
decided to have it at seven o’clock in the morn- 
ing. The theme was “How to Find a New 
Life!” 

The Hindu clerks of a certain city wanted an 
extra meeting, and since no other time could be 
found they came out at 7:30 A. M. before going 
to their offices. 

The Non-Cooperators had captured the munici- 
pality of and were in charge. The whole 
city was dressed in white home-spun khaddar, 
the sign of the Nationalist. When one went into 





100 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


the city with other than white garments on he 
felt like a speckled bird. Riots had taken place 
nearby, and feeling was running very high. The 
British official in charge of the district warned 
us that if we went into the city for meetings, 
he could not be responsible for our safety. But 
we felt we should go, and went. One of the mis- 
sionaries wrote to Mr. Gandhi and told him that 
I was giving addresses in the city, and asked 
him to kindly write to his Nationalists and ask 
them to come. He wrote back immediately, for 
he is very prompt in his correspondence, and said 
that we would be very happy to have his people 
come, in fact, had written them to that effect. 
When they got this word they came to us and 
asked if they could not take charge of the meet- 
ings. I told them that I was not going to talk 
politics, but Christ. Nevertheless, three of the 
leading Hindu Nationalists signed the notices 
that went out calling the meetings. The hall 
filled up immediately, so we had to go out into 
the open air. I saw at once that a good many 
of my hearers did not understand English. Let 
me say parenthetically, that I speak almost 
entirely in English to these non-Christian audi- 
ences, for nearly all the intelligentsia know Eng- 
lish, since the medium of instruction in the high 
schools and colleges is English, so that you can 
use the best you have and it is none too good. 


REGULAR CHANNELS 101 


But I saw at a glance that some of my audience 
was not English-educated. I turned to my chair- 
man and said, “I am not sure what I should do, 
for I do not know Gujarati [that was the local 
language]. I only know Hindustani, and there 
is no Christian here to interpret for me.” He 
promptly replied, “I shall be very happy indeed 
to interpret for you if you like.’ Here was a 
very long cry from the expectation of suffering 
violence at their hands, as the official had feared, 
to their taking charge of our meetings and inter- 
preting our message! I wondered how I would 
get my Christian message through my Hindu 
brother, but I remembered that David Brainerd 
used to preach through drunken interpreters to 
the American Indians and the power of the Spirit 
rested upon the meetings in spite of this, and I 
believed God would do the same thing for us, as 
our fine, clean Hindu friend interpreted our 
message. And he did! The next night they 
gave me another interpreter, also a Hindu, 
and we gave the message of the cross through 
him. 

At the close of the meeting one night I asked 
if they would like me to pray. I never pray 
publicly without asking their permission, and I 
have never had them refuse. At the close of the 
prayer a Mohammedan gentleman came up to 
me and said, “That was very disrespectful to- 


102 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


night—you had those people sit down while they 
prayed. They should have stood up in the pres- 
ence of God!” 

“All right,” I replied, “to-morrow night they 
will stand up.” 

When I finished the next night I again asked if 
they would like me to pray. They assented, so 
I asked them to rise. Now, it was the custom 
there that whenever they rose for the close of a 
meeting they always gave their national yells, 
so when they rose for the prayer across the au- 
dience went tremendous waves of “Bande Mata- 
ram” and “Mahatma Gandhi ki jai’—“Hail to 
the Motherland” and “Hail to Mahatma Gandhi!” 
Between my evangelistic appeal and my prayer 
we had the national cries. A glorious mixture! 
Somehow it didn’t jar, and when it quieted a 
bit I went on with my prayer as though nothing 
had happened. But India is nothing unless she 
is mixed—she mingles life and religion in a glo- 
rious confusion. I rather like it so! 

At the close of the meeting I suggested that I 
could not get close enough to them in these big 
meetings and asked if we might have a Round 
Table Conference with the leading citizens of 
this city. They assented, so the next day we met 
in the national school. I put off my shoes to the 
side and sat among them on the floor in pundit 
style. I saw that some of them had been parad- 


REGULAR CHANNELS 103 


ing the public streets, for they had placards on 
themselves on which was written: 

“Don’t pay your taxes to this Government.” 

“Go to jail with joy.” 

“The tears of the weak will undermine the 
strongest wall.” 

One would have thought that in an atmosphere 
of this kind, with the whole thing nervous with 
national excitement, there would be no spiritual 
response to my message. Here was a real 
struggle going on. Would they respond at all? 
On the contrary, there was a fine spiritual sensi- 
tiveness. Incidentally, may I say that I have 
been struck very forcibly with the difference in 
what happens to the spiritual natures of men 
who are engaged in warfare with military arms, 
and those with weapons of non-violent passive 
resistance. While there are many notable and ° 
noble exceptions, it is a truism to say that in war 
carried on by physical arms the men who are 
engaged in it are brutalized—the more so, the 
more efficient. On the contrary, I have found 
that the men who threw themselves in with Gan- 
dhi and really practiced his program were spir- 
itualized; it deepened their sense of moral 
values and made them self-sacrificial. Nothing 
could be a greater condemnation of the one type 
and a commendation of the other than the respec- 
tive effects upon the personalities engaged in 


104 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


them. Here I sat before men—very determined 
men—who were willing to lose their all in the 
fight they were making with a system of govern- 
ment from the West to which I belonged, and 
there was no hatred, only a heightened moral 
and spiritual appreciation and sensitiveness. 

I talked to them of my Master. In the midst 
of the discussion I used the phrase the “Christ 
of the Indian Road” and I noted how they kept 
referring to it again and again. It had caught 
their imagination. He seemed so intimately 
theirs. He seemed to have come in from the 
Indian Road and had sat upon the floor with us 
there in the quietness of that Indian twilight. 
In the discussion we talked of India and her 
need. I did not talk to them as though India 
were foreign to me, for it was no longer so. I 
was born in the West and love it, but India has 
become my home; India’s people have become 
my people; her problems, my problems; her fu- 
ture, my future; and I would like to wear upon 
my heart her sins if I could lift her to my 
Saviour. I told them I wanted to be thought of 
as at least an adopted son of India. I turned 
to them and said: “Brothers, what can we do 
with these sixty million outcastes? They are a 
millstone around our national neck. Our coun- 
try will never be strong until we lift them. How 
ean we do it?” 


REGULAR CHANNELS 105 


A thoughtful Hindu rose and said, “It will 
take a Christ to lift them.” 

As we sat there in the soft light of that Indian 
evening every one of us felt that he was right. 
It would take a Christ to lift them. But some 
of us went further and included ourselves in 
it—it would take a Christ to lift us too, and 
not all of those who felt this way were avowed 
followers of this Christ. 

The Indian people are an intensely religious 
people, and when the wealth of this wonderful 
spiritual capacity is placed at the disposal of 
Jesus the product will be beautiful indeed. One 
day some prominent Hindus came to me and 
said, “They are having a government fair at 
K———.” (It was very like our County Fair 
at home with exhibits, agricultural displays, 
horse racing, sports, wrestling, ete.) “It is all 
very good, but there is no religion in it. We 
have come to ask if you won’t come and put 
some religion in it.” I asked what they would 
like me to do and they replied, “We want you to 
come and give some addresses in the Durbar 
Tent.” I gasped, for the Durbar Tent was the 
official tent where the government officials held 
their functions. I told them to go on and get it 
if they could. They returned indignant. “The 
idea,” they said, ‘the official said to us that we 
could not have the addresses in the Durbar Tent, 


106 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


for that would seem to imply that government 
was back of religion, but we could have them in 
the Wrestling Pit with its tiers of seats all 
around. The idea of putting religion into the 
wrestling pit! If we can’t put it in the Durbar 
Tent we won’t have the meeting at all!’ We had 
no meetings. But I had the feeling as I talked 
with those men that when India really accepts 
Christ he will not be put off on the edges of life. 
He will be put at the very seat of government to 
control and mold and possess all. 

The last night I was in India before sailing for 
the present furlough I was addressing an eager 
crowd of non-Christians in It was the 
last night of the series, and the situation became 
tense and electric as I asked them to then and 
there make a personal decision for Christ. I was 
in the midst of my appeal when a Hindu sud- 
denly stopped me and said: “Wait a minute, sir, 
you ask us to become Christians. Before you go 
on will you tell me what you are doing in regard 
to the question of the rights of Indians in Amer- 
ica? Tell us that before you ask us to follow 
Christ.” I was compelled to stop and explain 
just my position in the matter; told him how 
some of us had signed a protest to the Depart- 
ment of State and so on. He seemed satisfied, 
but note this: before I could go on and finish up 
my appeal I had to make myself right on that 





REGULAR CHANNELS 107 


whole racial situation. I could not advance an- 
other inch without that. 

You can see from these little windows I have 
thrown open what an amazing evangelistic oppor- 
tunity presents itself. There has never been any- 
thing so big and challenging. But we cannot 
advance into it, cannot handle it with any degree 
of moral and spiritual authority, until we right 
ourselves upon some of these great racial issues. 

That leads me to my next chapter, a chapter 
which I dislike to face, but the whole program 
of the evangelization of the East depends upon 
our taking a Christian attitude toward the 
nations of the Orient. 


CHAPTER VI 
THE GREAT HINDRANCE 


To understand the attitude of India toward 
the West one has to keep in mind the existence 
in India of what Professor H. A. Miller calls “an 
oppression psychosis.” He defines “oppression” 
as “the domination of one group by another, po- 
litically, economically, or culturally—singly or 
in combination.” And by “psychosis” he means 
“those persistent and aggravated mental states 
which are characteristically produced under con- 
ditions where one group dominates another.” 
India feels that she is being dominated cultur- 
ally, economically, and politically by the West. 
An “oppression psychosis” has resulted. 

A good deal of the bitter criticism of the West 
on the part of India at the present time is un- 
doubtedly the result of that psychosis. Under 
existing conditions it is almost psychologically 
impossible for India to find or appreciate any 
good in the West and openly acknowledge it. 
Indians may appropriate from the West, but as 
long as they are conscious that they are Indians 
they cannot acknowledge their debt. I have 
found many foreign students in America who 

108 





THE GREAT HINDRANCE 109 


were getting all their education and training 
here, but I have not seen a single one who while 
being self-conscious as an Indian, could find any- 
thing good in America or her civilization. Only 
at times when they, for the moment, forgot they 
were Indians could they acknowledge any 
good. 

I do not think that India will ever openly and 
frankly appropriate from Western civilization or 
from the Western church until she is freed from 
this oppression psychosis, in other words, till she 
is politically self-governing. 

Britain has on the whole given India good gov- 
ernment, but until India feels she stands as a free 
people there can be no frank and balanced eval- 
uation of what the West contains. 

India can now take from Christ because she is 
able to disassociate him from the West, but she 
finds it difficult to take from the Christian 
Church or from missionaries, for in these cases 
the disassociation is not easy. But even here mis- 
sionaries may lose their Western identity, so to 
speak, and may so merge their lives and endeay- 
ors with India that they are no longer a part of 
the dominating influences, but take their place 
as serving friends and brothers. As a social 
thinker, a Hindu, said to me, “Western civiliza- 
tion was never at such a low ebb in our estimate 
as now, but you missionaries never stood higher; 


110 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


you come not to exploit us but to serve us.” If 
we come as the servants of the situation, we step 
out of any dominating movement that may be the 
program of the West. 

In dealing with the criticism of India toward 
the West we must keep in mind this psychosis, 
make allowances for it, and be patient. 

But we fool ourselves if we dismiss it at that. 
For this oppression psychosis has very good basis 
for its existence—not so much from deliberate 
governmental policy as from the daily contacts 
of white men with brown; the snobbery, the 
taken-for-granted attitude that any white man is 
superior to any brown—these are the things that 
rub into soreness the soul of India and make it 
smart. If the Indian, smarting under these as- 
sumed attitudes, turns upon the West in in- 
vective and biting criticism, let us remember that 
his criticism is pointed with the knowledge the 
Indian now possesses that when we take these 
attitudes we are cutting absolutely across every- 
thing that our religion teaches. He knows that 
these things are not Christian. 

If the centering of everything upon the person 
of Jesus clears the issue and has given us a new 
vitalizing of our work in India, nevertheless it 
has come back upon us in a terrific judgment. 
India is doing nothing less than judging us in 
the light—the white light of the Spirit of Jesus, 


THE GREAT HINDRANCE 111 


They have caught the meaning of what it is to be 
a real Christian; in the light of that they are 
judging us. We could stand in the light of the 
civilization of other times and climes, and feel 
on the whole that we have come off pretty well, 
but it is another thing to be judged in the light 
of His spirit and demand. 

In speaking to an audience in India I have 
often mentioned the incident of the church in 
South Africa with a sign on it, “Asiatics and 
Hottentots not allowed,” and how Mahatma 
Gandhi could not get into the church because he 
was an Asiatic, and have ended up by saying that 
my own Master could not get into the church be- 
cause he too was an Asiatic. I have noted the 
pained scorn that would go across the faces of 
the audience. But the audience was not espe- 
cially conscious or disturbed that the low-caste 
people were excluded from their own temples, not 
by signs, but by the decree of religion and cus- 
tom. In the one case they were judging them- 
selves in the light of their own religion, but they 
were judging us in the light of the Spirit of 
Jesus. It is no answer, then, to say that they 
do the same things toward their own people— 
they are judging us by the religion we avow and 
by the Christ whom we profess to follow, and 
they have a right to do so. I am personally glad 
that they are doing it—cut as it may—for our 


112 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


salvation as well as theirs depends upon our 
being brought back to his mind and purpose. 

A thoughtful Hindu said to me one day, “If 
you call one of us a Christian man, he is compli- 
mented, but if you call him a Christian, he is 
insulted.” In that penetrating statement we get 
the epitome of the situation: the designation of 
Christian may mean that he is a member of the 
Christian community—Indian or European—it 
may not mean much; but to call him a Christian 
man is to pay the highest compliment that can 
be paid. They see that to be a Christian man is 
to catch the Spirit of Jesus. 

A little Hindu girl caught the meaning of what 
a real Christian is when she gave this definition 
of a Christian: “One who is different from all 
others.” 

But many of the Christians are not Christian. 
A Hindu in the great city of said to me, 
“If you can show me one real Christian in this 
city, Pll be a Christian.” Overstated? Yes, but 
it carries its meaning. 

A Hindu teacher said to me one day, “I want 
to become a Christian, but I do so in spite of the 
lives of the Europeans I have seen here. They 
seem to have two loathings—one is religion and 
the other is water.” And he did not mean it for 
bathing, but for drinking purposes! This was 
said in a section of the East where far too many 





THE GREAT HINDRANCE 113 


European planters have their native concubines. 
Their race prejudices do not extend to their 
lusts. 

I was in a certain city where two Europeans 
had fought a duel and both had been killed. The 
Hindus, out of the kindness of their hearts, 
buried them, and wishing to make an offering to 
the spirits of the dead, after thinking the matter 
over, thought they would love in death what they 
had loved in life, so came and offered as an offer- 
ing on the tomb a cigar box and a whisky bottle. 

But it is not merely the lives of some local 
Europeans that are the great hindrance, but the 
whole wide world has now become a whispering 
gallery, and India is listening in. I have broad- 
cast a number of times since I came home, and 
it was uncanny to feel that my conversational 
tones spoken into a tiny disk in an obscure corner 
were being listened to hundreds and thousands 
of miles away. That thing is happening in a 
broader sense. What we are doing in legislative 
halls and in the seemingly obscure incidents of 
racial attitudes is being broadcast to the rest 
of the world—and there is a loud speaker at the 
other end. 

Listen to the loud speaker in this story giving 
its message: I sat in the midst of a group of 
earnest Nationalists in a Round Table Confer- 
ence. I said: “My brothers, I have been talking 


114 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


to you these nights about Christ. I want you to 
tell me frankly and openly why you do not accept 
him. Do not spare me, for I am not the issue— 
tell me frankly.” A Hindu arose and said, “You 
ask us to be Christians; may we ask you how 
Christian is your own civilization? Don’t you 
have corruption at your central government at 
Washington?” (It was just after the revelations 
at Washington when oil began to flow!) 

Another asked, “Don’t you lynch Negroes in 
America?” 

A third: “You have had Christianity in the 
West all these centuries, and though Jesus is the 
Prince of Peace you have not yet learned the 
way out of war. Don’t you know any more about 
Christianity than that?” 

These things were not said in spleen and 
hatred, but in anxiety and thoughtfulness. The 
loud speaker was speaking on the other side of 
the world. 

Here is another scene that has its meaning. I 
was in a section of India where, just before our 
coming, there had been near-riots over the ques- 
tion of the baptism of a Hindu girl. Indignation 
meetings had been held and the city was in tur- 
moil. We held our meetings with this back- 
ground of unrest and resentment. We won- 
dered if we would get any hearing at all. To our 
surprise there were great crowds and a most re- 


THE GREAT HINDRANCE 115 


spectful and interested hearing. The last night 
a room at the rear was filled with earnest seek- 
ers after new life through Christ. But on the 
threshold of that invitation to give themselves 
to Christ was this incident: At question time 
a voice came out of the back of the crowd, “What 
do you think of the K. K. K.?” This was about 
four years ago, when I had scarcely heard of the 
Klan myself. But here in a backwater of India, 
a place where I thought the least from the out- 
side would penetrate, the loud speaker was 
speaking and was embarrassing our witness and 
message. I have many fine friends in the Klan, 
and they are sincere and earnest, but since they 
are a religious organization and have the cross 
at the center of their gatherings, their racial atti- 
tudes are a decided embarrassment to us. 

The local whisper intended to deal with a local 
American problem was resounding around the 
world and cutting across the message we were 
giving to India. 

Nothing spoke louder to that whole Eastern 
world than the recent action of Congress in pass- 
ing the ill-advised and un-Christian Immigration 
Law. I wish America could see what she did in 
that bit of hasty legislation. Up to that time 
America held the moral leadership of the East. 
It was a moral asset to be an American. Japan 
was grateful for what we had done by our won- 


116 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


derful generosity after the earthquake; China 
was more than friendly because of the indemnity 
incident and our traditional attitude of friendli- 
ness, and India was moved by the idealism of 
Wilson and the realism of what we had actually 
done in bringing the Philippine Islands so 
quickly to practical self-government. In Persia 
we were loved and respected because of the help 
that disinterested Americans had given to assist 
Persia to her feet financially, as this incident 
shows: I was among the Syrian refugees in 
Bagdad. They had fled before the Kurds from 
Urumiyah, Persia. The watch that I wear was 
given to me by the Syrians for what I was able 
to do for them in their time of trouble. But this 
was nothing compared to the gratitude another 
section of them felt when they fled for protection 
to the compound of the American Mission in 
Persia. As the Kurds came on, bent on blood, 
the missionary put out the American flag in 
front of the compound. The Kurdish leader did 
not know what flag it was. When told it was an 
American flag he advanced and was met by the 
missionary, who said, “This is an American flag 
and in its name I ask for protection for the ref- 
ugees here.” The leader thought a moment, 
turned to his men and ordered them to retire. 
They were spared, protected by the flag. The 
refugees, overjoyed, kissed the flag that had de- 


THE GREAT HINDRANCE TMU 


livered them. That is what the American flag 
stood for in the East at the close of the Great 
War and after. In one moment by this Immigra- 
tion Law we renounced the leadership that was 
in our hands. 

We talk as if this were a Japanese problem, 
but India and China are put in the same position 
as Japan. 

Do not misunderstand me. I am not advo- 
cating the flooding of America by immigrants. 
My own views are embodied in the resolution 
passed by the Federal Council of Churches of 
America and the last General Conference of the 
Methodist Episcopal Church: 

“We urge a federal law raising the standards 
for admission into the United States, applying 
them to all nations alike, and granting the privi- 
lege of citizenship to all those thus admitted who 
duly qualify regardless of their race, color, or 
nationality.” 

This would mean that we could put the bars 
as high as we like, provided there is no racial 
discrimination and consequent insult. 

If the present law were extended to apply to 
all nations alike, it would mean, according to the 
first provision of the law, namely, that two per 
cent of the nationals of the 1890 census can be 
admitted, that 40 Japanese, 2,140 Chinese, and 
42 East Indians would be admitted each year. 


118 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


But the second section of the law provides that 
“the annual quota of any nationality beginning 
July 1, 1927, shall be a number which bears the 
same ratio to 150,000 as the number of inhab- 
itants in continental United States in 1920 hav- 
ing that national origin bears to the number of 
inhabitants in continental United States in 
1920.” This would mean that after July 1, 1927, 
the number of Japanese admitted would be 159, 
Chinese 87, and East Indians 4, making a total 
of 250 people from Asia. This is nothing among 
a population of 114,000,000 and would never 
mean an economic or social problem. The fact 
is that the East is not keen to flood America. 
I was talking to an Indian official, the vice-presi- 
dent of the Legislative Assembly, and I said, 
“Suppose we should be able to get India put on 
a quota basis, it would mean that there would be 
actually less Indians admitted into America than 
before, for now about eight hundred or nine hun- 
dred are being admitted each year, largely ac- 
cording to the will of the American Consul in 
Calcutta; this would cut the number down to 
about four in all; would you not therefore feel 
that we had done India an injustice by having 
India put on a quota basis?’ He replied: “We 
do not care how many of our people go to Amer- 
ica. We do not want them to go, but we do not 
want them nationally insulted if they do go.” 


THE GREAT HINDRANCE 119 


The fact of the matter is that many more than 
two hundred and fifty are now being smuggled 
into America across the Mexican and Canadian 
borders and we have no redress. We can bring 
no pressure to bear upon the governments of 
these countries to stop this illicit smuggling, for 
the whole thing is too sore a point to raise with 
them, and they are in no mood to assist us in 
stopping it. The shortsightedness of Congress 
overreached itself and has left us in a worse con- 
dition regarding fiooding than before. But I do 
not advocate the modification of the law because 
of the self-interest involved, nor because of its 
effects upon Christian missions, but because it 
is Christian to treat other nations as we ourselves 
would like to be treated. 

It has been said that to repeal this law would 
be worth more than sending one hundred mis- 
Sionaries to the East. I should be inclined to 
doubt that estimate and to go further, and say, 
that in certain circles those missionaries who 
are there now will either mark time until it is 
repealed or win the people in spite of being 
Americans. I go back to the East with a heavy 
heart, knowing that I shall have to apologize 
for the attitude of the land of my birth to the 
land of my adoption. I shall meet it in every 
public meeting at question time, in nearly every 
personal conversation and in the changed atti- 


120 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


tude of sullen indifference. This legislation has 
broken our arms as we stretch them out in friend- 
liness and good will toward the nations of the 
East, and yet it was from Asia that we got the 
one thing that is truly worth while in our civil- 
ization and the one thing that we look to to 
save us—Christ. 

The Hindus have discovered that Jesus looked 
on man apart from race and birth and color; that 
he looked on man as man and believed in the 
sacredness of personality as such. They know 
that he was color blind and that the vision that 
he saw and that he aimed to transmit to others 
was that there is “one race, one color and one 
soul in humanity.” In the white light of that con- 
ception they are judging us. I have had this story 
concerning the origin of the white man quoted to 
me by an Indian: “God asked the man who is 
now white what he had done with his brother, 
and he turned white with fear.” Read the book 
entitled The Black Man’s Burden and you will 
come to the conclusion that there is enough truth 
in the above story to make it sting. 

Mr. C. F. Andrews writes: “A Hindu gentle- 
man of my acquaintance said to me, ‘Do you not 
see what is happening? Mr. S is tearing 
down your work faster than you can build it up. 
Every time he calls us niggers it is a blow dealt 
to your religion, for you teach us that caste is 





THE GREAT HINDRANCE 121 


sinful, while you Christians are building up a 
white caste of your own.” 

For the life of me I cannot see any essential 
difference between this white caste which we are 
building up and the Brahman caste of India, 
except that the former is based upon the color 
of the pigment of the skin with which one hap- 
pens to be born, and the other is based upon the 
family into which birth brings one. They are 
both based upon the accidents of birth. If there 
is any real difference, it is in this, that the Brah- 
man caste idea is according to his religion and 
has its sanction, and our white-caste idea is di- 
rectly opposed to our faith and has its condemna- 
tion, and therefore of the two ours is the more 
hideous and reprehensible. Both should go. 

A penetrating, but kindly old philosopher of 
India, Bara Dada, the brother of Dr. Rabindra- 
nath Tagore, pronounced this judgment: as we 
sat in the evening talking for long hours about 
these things he thoughtfully said, “Jesus is ideal ee 
and wonderful, but you Christians—you are not 
like him.” 

If we should be like him, if we should catch 
his spirit and outlook, what would happen? A 
Hindu lecturer on educational subjects was ad- 
dressing an audience of educationalists in South 
India when he paused and said: “I see that a yr 
good many of you here are Christians. Now, this 


122 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


is not a religious lecture, but I would like to 
pause long enough to say that, if you Christians 
would live like Jesus Christ, India would be at 
your feet to-morrow.” He said nothing less than 
the very truth. 

Another Hindu put the matter just as strongly 
but in different words. He was a Hindu head 
judge of a native state and was the chairman of 
my meeting. At the close of the address he spoke 
to the audience in these words: “You have heard 
to-night what it means to be a Christian. If to 
be like Christ is what it means, I hope you will 
all be Christians in your lives.” Then, turning 
to us who were Christians, he said: “I have one 
word to speak to you: if you Christians had lived 
more like Jesus Christ, this process of conversion 
would have gone on much more rapidly.” It was 
sincerely and truly said. 

This judgment of the West by the East in the 
light of the person of Jesus is powerfully ex- 
pressed in the lines which a Bengali poet wrote 
on Christmas Day and sent to my friend Mr. 
©. F. Andrews: 

“Great-souled Christ, on this the blessed day 
of your birth, we who are not Christians bow be- 
fore you. We love and worship you, we non- 
Christians, for with Asia you are bound with the 
ties of blood. 

“We, the puny people of a great country, are 


THE GREAT HINDRANCE 123 


nailed to the cross of servitude. We look mutely 
up to you, hurt and wounded at every turn of 
our torture—the foreign ruler over us the crown 
of thorns; our own social caste system the bed 
of spikes on which we lie. 

“The world stands aghast at the earth hunger 
of Europe. Imperialism in the arms of Mam- 
mon dances with unholy glee. The three witches 
—War Lust, Power Lust, Profit Lust—revel on 
the barren hearths of Europe holding their 
orgies. 

“There is no room for thee there in Europe. 
Come, Lord Christ, come away! Take your 
stand in Asia—the land of Buddha, Kabir and 
Nanak. At the sight of you our sorrow-laden 
hearts will be lightened. O Teacher of love, come 
down into our hearts and teach us to feel the 
sufferings of others, to serve the leper and the 
pariah with an all-embracing love.” 

This poetic appeal loses none of its power of 
judgment and appeal even if we could have 
wished that he had said that instead of Christ 
coming away he had asked that he would enter 
more deeply into the life of the West. Come, 
Lord Christ, come away? Nay, Lord Christ, do 
not go away! For we too have sorrow-laden 
hearts; and if the East is crucified on a cross of 
servitude, we are being crucified on a cross of 
materialism. We both need thee—desperately. 


124 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


This judgment of the East is a call calling us 
back to our own Master and Lord. As such we 
welcome it. It shocks us from our smug com- 
placency. It is the earthquake that does not 
destroy us, but looses our chains. It is the angel 
that smites us and says, “Arise.” This searching 
criticism of the East is a Godsend to keep us 
from falling asleep after taking an overdose of 
the opiate of material prosperity. It is God’s 
own voice to us. It is stabbing us awake. 

This story tells what I mean. An Indian 
Christian doctor came to see me one morning in 
a far-off hill station. He said he was deeply 
troubled in mind. He unfolded this story: “I 
was aship’s doctor. In Hongkong I met a Parsee 
with whom I became friendly. One day he 
turned to me and said, ‘Are you living the Chris- 
tian life?’ ‘It is impossible,’ I answered. ‘Dif- 
ficult but not impossible,’ he replied, ‘for His liv- 
ing Presence gives you power.’ I found that 
though he was a Parsee he was more of a Chris- 
tian than I was. When my boat sailed back to 
India my Parsee friend was on the dock to see 
me off. As the ship pulled off from the dock he 
put his hands to his mouth and shouted to me 
across the widening gulf, ‘Remember, Seek ye 
first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, 
and all these things shall be added unto you.’ 
The sight of that Parsee and the sound of his 


THE GREAT HINDRANCE 125 


voice calling to me that phrase ‘Seek first the 
Kingdom’ have haunted me. I haven’t been seek- 
ing the Kingdom first. I have come to you to 
pray with me.” There we knelt, and that fine 
doctor made the surrender and arose, adjusted 
to the will of Christ—and happy. The Kingdom 
was to be first! But the anomaly: a Parsee had 
led him to it! 

Across the widening gulf between East and 
West I see the awakened East, realizing how 
deeply endangered we are by materialism and 
racialism, and knowing that only as we are saved 
can we save them, putting its hands to its lips 
and calling to us of the West, “Seek first the 
kingdom of God.” May it haunt and woo us to 
repentance and to Christ as it did my Indian 
brother! Only thus can we turn back and share 
and save. 

The situation is summed up in the words of a 


far-secing Christian thinker and statesman: “We ~~ 


recognize that conditions in the West demand 
an indubitable and pervasive humility on the 
part of Christians, and that a deep sense of na- 
tional and racial repentance should accompany 
any further missionary work that we may do.” 
With these brave words of the Christian 
thinker agrees the penetrating but kindly counsel 
of India’s great soul, Mahatma Gandhi. In con- 
versation with him one day I said, “Mahatma 


126 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


Gandhi, I am very anxious to see Christianity 
naturalized in India, so that it shall be no longer 
a foreign thing identified with a foreign people 
and a foreign government, but a part of the na- 
tional life of India and contributing its power 
to India’s uplift and redemption. What would 
you suggest that we do to make that possible?” 
He very gravely and thoughtfully replied: “I 
would suggest, first, that all of you Christians, 
missionaries and all, must begin to live more like 
Jesus Christ.” He needn’t have said anything 
more—that was quite enough. I knew that look- 
ing through his eyes were the three hundred 
millions of India, and speaking through his voice 
were the dumb millions of the East saying to me, 
_ a representative of the West, and through me to 
that very West itself, “If you will come to us 
in the spirit of your Master, we cannot resist 
you.” Never was there a greater challenge to 
the West than that, and never was it more sin- 
cerely given. “Second,” he said, “I would sug- 
gest that you must practice your religion without 
adulterating or toning it down.” This is just as 
remarkable as the first. The greatest living non- 
Christian asks us not to adulterate it or tone it 
down, not to meet them with an emasculated gos- 
pel, but to take it in its rugged simplicity and 
high demand. But what are we doing? As 
someone has suggested, we are inoculating the 


THE GREAT HINDRANCE 127 


world with a mild form of Christianity, so that 
it is now practically immune against the real 
thing. Vast areas of the Christian world are 
inoculated with a mild form of Christianity, and 
the real thing seems strange and impossible. As 
one puts it, “Our churches are made up of people 
who would be equally shocked to see Christian- 
ity doubted or put into practice.” I am not 
anxious to see India take a mild form—I want 
her to take the real thing. “Third, I would sug- 
gest that you must put your emphasis upon love, 
for love is the center and soul of Christianity.” 
He did not mean love as a sentiment, but love as 
a working force, the one real power in a moral 
universe, and he wanted it applied between indi- 
viduals and groups and races and nations, the 
one cement and salvation of the world. With a 
soul so sensitive to the meaning of love no won- 
der there were tears in his eyes when I read him 
at that point the thirteenth chapter of First 
Corinthians. “Fourth, I would suggest that you 
study the non-Christian religions and culture 
more sympathetically in order to find the good 
that is in them, so that you might have a more 
sympathetic approach to the people.” Quite 
right. Certainly we should be sincerely grate- 
ful for any truth found anywhere, knowing 
that it is a finger post that points to Jesus, who 
is the Truth. 


128 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


When I mentioned these four things to the 
Chief Justice of the High Court in North India, 
the noble, sympathetic, Christian Britisher ex- 
claimed: “He could not have put his finger on 
four more important things. It took spiritual 
genius and insight to do that.” 

When I asked another nationalist leader the 
Same question as to what we must do to nat- 
uralize Christianity, he replied, “You must haye 
more men like and ,’ naming two 
men among the missionaries who were devoted 
lovers of Christ and of India. 

Here, then, is the epitome of the whole thing: 
From every side they say we must be Christian, 
but Christian in a bigger, broader way than we 
have hitherto been. 








One word of caution: Some who have little 
love for endeavors of uplift for those outside their 
own racial group may seize.on the above chapter 
as a justification for withdrawing everything 
from others and concentrating it upon them- 
selves, forgetting that this is a disastrous fallacy, 
for the moment we cease to share with others 
where there is seemingly no return and recom- 
pense to ourselves, that moment we cease to be 
Christian. We cannot be Christian and concen- 
trate ourselves on ourselves. America can never 
be Christian apart from its world task. 


THE GREAT HINDRANCE 129 


“Oh, East is Hast and West is West, 
And never the twain shall meet.” 
So spake a son of man—and erred! 


Oh, man is man and man with man shall meet, 
So taught the Son of man, and at his feet, 

Bade us there learn the worth of human worth; 
To see the man apart from race and birth. 


To find in Aryan pale and Aryan brown, 
In Mongol and in sun-blacked African, 

The oneness of humanity—the same 
God-touched, aspiring, worthful soul of man. 


Boast not, oh Aryan pale, o’er Aryan brown, 
Of greatness not in thee—'tis in the gift! 

For, once, a nail-pierced Hand of Asia touched 
Thy life and grants thee now his gracious lift. 


Beware, lest in the roll of judging years, 
That Hand, withdrawn from thee through pride 
of race, 
May touch to power those races now despised, 
And grant to them thy forfeit—power and place. 


The Master bids thee lose thy petty self 

In service, and thy help to brothers give; 
And thou shalt truly find thyself again, 

*Twill be thy gain, and others too shall live. 


Thus freed from tribal mind and attitude, 
Thy Christianed soul, with self renounced, shall 
find 
A larger, richer self of brotherhood ; 
Since, with the Christ, it has the Kingdom mind. 


130 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


A Kingdom where there is no East nor West; 
There are no walls dividing clan from clan; 
But brotherhood as wide as humankind, 
And with a King who is the “Son of man.” 


Oh, man is man, and man with man shall meet, 
So speaks the Son of man. O Master! shamed, 
But learning, sit we here—here at thy feet. 


CHAPTER VII 
THE QUESTION HOUR 


WHILE at one of the university centers of 
America it was announced that I would answer 
questions at the close if the audience desired. 
Among those who stayed were many students, 
American and foreign, and among them some 
Hindus from India. These Hindu students put 
me through a grilling for several hours. At the 
close I remarked to someone: “This is the first 
time I have really felt at home in America. I 
feel as though I have been in India to-night.” 
After almost every meeting in India we allow 
the non-Christians to ask questions—and grilled 
we are! 

When I began to throw open my meetings in 
India for questions I knew I was inviting disas- 
ter, for the Hindu mind is quite as good as ours, 
and he loves argument. Besides the possibility 
of having everything you have said in your ad- 
dress upset by questions, I was quite conscious 
of another danger. Christianity cannot be un- 
derstood except in a quiet mood of moral and 
spiritual receptivity and insight. Questions 
often change the quiet atmosphere to one of bel- 

131 


132 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


ligerency. Nevertheless, there was so much mis- 
understanding, so much rejecting of a caricature 
of Christianity, that I felt we should face every- 
thing fairly and dodge no issue. 

I would not have dared to do it had I not been 
given in the very beginning of this work a verse 
that has seemed my very own: “And when they 
shall deliver you up before kings and governors 
for my name’s sake for a testimony unto them, 
be not anxious what ye shall speak, for it shall be 
given you in that hour what ye shall speak, for 
it is not ye that speak, but the spirit of your 
Father which speaketh in you.” That assurance 
was sufficient for me. I believed it. I could do 
nothing less. 

The question hour becomes tense at times, but 
we have tried to make it a point never to let it 
degenerate into a mere quibble, or to allow it to 
stir bad blood. To lose one’s temper would be 
to lose one’s case, for we are not there to win 
arguments, but to win men. I cannot remember 
when ill feeling has been left after any single 
meeting. We have tried to demonstrate inci- 
dentally that one can discuss these thorny ques- 
tions with quiet good humor. 

There is an amazing range of questions from 
those of a confused, but spiritually earnest, ques- 
tioner, to the questions of the quibbler who de- 
sires to show off his smartness. To let you see 


THE QUESTION HOUR 133 


what questions India is asking, I give a few sam- 
ples taken almost at random from many hun- 
dreds sent up: 


Ques.—Is Christianity a universal religion? If so, 
why are there sectional feelings going on? 
Catholics hate Protestants, the Greek Church 
contradicts both. 

Ques.—Why did God make a world where he ought 
to have known evil would come, where brutes 
who trade on hunger, who convert into coin 
the patience of the poor, the sweat of slaves, 
would exist? Where rascally sycophants 
would have power and righteous men rot in 
jails; where, in short, Christ would be cruci- 
fied? Who is responsible for such a world? 

Ques.—Do you sincerely believe that there are many 
fine Christians having the true democratic 
spirit of Christ? How do you account for 
the feeling of racial superiority which the 
Westerners have? What Christian spirit is 
that which makes Australians, the Cana- 
dians, and the people of America prevent 
Indians from coming into their country and 
enjoying equal privileges with them? 

Ques.—Does not the present war—a war among the 
followers of Christ—proye that there is 
something wrong with the teachings of 
Christ? 

Ques.—Supposing that from four corners in a square 
four men desire to get to the center. 
They will go in different directions, but they 
will get to the center. There are different 
religions but they all lead to the center: God. 


134 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


But the ways are not the same. Why do 
you say there is only one way? There are 
many ways. You cannot prescribe the same 
drug for every disease. 

Ques.—In your lecture last evening you took it for 
granted that all the stories in the gospel are 
true. Is it not possible that the writers, who 
were not men of culture, either distorted the 
facts or exaggerated them? Could it not be 
that their enthusiasm misled them into 
wrong judgments and that they wrote out 
even false rumors among the ignorant 
masses? 

Ques.—I will pay Christianity the compliment of 
thinking that if the world were ruled by 
strict Christian tenets, it would be a semi- 
paradise. But the grim fact of our experi- 
ence is that it is the Christian that has by 
iniquitous means come by the major portion 
of this planet, which he keeps under his iron 
rod. So is it not more proper that the mis- 
sionaries, with their gifts of head and heart, 
endeavored to moralize their own coreligion- 
ists instead of pursuing the wild-goose chase 
of conversion, for, after all, numbers are ab- 
solutely irrelevant to the greatness of a 
faith ? 

Ques.—How is it that divorces are a part of Chris- 
tianity in the West? 

Ques.—Is King George a real Christian? Then, 
pointing to a prominent Indian Christian in 
front, he asked, “Is Mr. J here a real 
Christian ?” 

Ques.—Don’t you think we could put Mohammedan- 





THE QUESTION HOUR 135 


ism and Christianity together? Jesus lived 
a very high, a very lofty, a very ideal, a very 
sinless life, and he did not marry. Moham- 
med did marry, so I suggest that when we 
put these two religions together we make 
Jesus the theory or ideal of the religion and 
Mohammed the practice. 

Ques.—We are two young men who after hearing 
your addresses desire to become Christians. 
But as you seem to be a holy man, we would 
like to test your powers; we are not going 
to sign this letter—can you tell us who we 
are? 

Ques.—Why do Christians wear neckties? Is it the 
sign of the Cross or is it a custom? 
Ques.—How is it that women in Christianity are in 
the lowest degradation, they are considered 
an object of scorn, they have no rights of 
any kind, while in Mohammedanism when 
Mohammed said, “What is due from her is 
due to her,” he raised her at one bound to 
an equality with man? Is this no improve- 
ment on Christianity? (Sent in by a Moham- 

medan. ) 

Ques.—If salvation of human beings lies only 
through faith in Jesus, what is to happen to 
those who cannot sincerely believe in the 
Christian gospel? 

Ques.— What is to happen to the souls of those who 
have never had the opportunity of hearing 
the gospel of Christ? 

Ques.—If I suffer for my misdeeds, and if it is right 
before God and man that I should suffer, 
why should a man in his ignorance come and 


1386 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


help me in the name of love? Is he not un- 
consciously weakening my cause, and thwart- 
ing God’s plan and Nature’s law? Is not 
the social servant an indiscreet almsgiver? 

Ques.—It is again said that after man fell even then 
God did not forsake him, but devised a plan 
by which he might be restored to a great 
happiness that he lost. And what.forsooth 
is this “plan”? Why, he sent his Son to die 
for them, and this also after having allowed 
thousands of years to pass by and millions 
of people hopelessly to perish and to go to 
that place of torment called “hell,” which he 
had prepared for them. Now, is this not an 
old woman’s tale such as the nurses frighten 
the babes withal? 

Ques.—Why does a Hindu accept Christ, but reject 
Christianity ? 

Ques.—Can moral life, even if it is touched with 
emotion, satisfy the human soul which is 
yearning for the imperishable and eternal 
union with the Eternal Spirit transcending 
all limitations of space and relativity? 

Ques.—Is the world safe for Christ? If Christ were 
to come to-day among the Christian nations 
of the earth, do you think he would not be 
crucified ? 

Ques.—Can one be a Christian without baptism? 

Ques.—Do you think that’to be a follower of Christ 
fully and truly one should accept Christian 
dogma also? Would you agree with the 
Frenchman who defined dogma as the living 
faith of the dead and the dead faith of the 
living? 


THE QUESTION HOUR 137 


Ques.—May it be pointed out in all humility and 
reverence that it is necessary to preach 
Christ instead of Christianity to India? 

Ques.—Is the idea of redemption peculiar to Chris- 
tianity and foreign to other religions? Do 
you not think that the idea of God as Friend 
and Companion is the insistent note of the 
non-monistic school of Indian thought such 
aS Vaishnavism ? 

Ques.—If Christianity is fitted to become a universal 
religion, what new and exclusive truths has 
it to teach over and above what other great 
religions like Hinduism or Buddhism have 
taught? 

Ques.—If a religion should appeal to men of dif- 
ferent natures and temperaments in order to 
claim universal acceptance, then has not 
Hinduism, which shows three paths, namely, 
Gnana, Karma, and Bhakti, better claim to 
it, than Christianity, which indicates only 
the paths of love and Bhakti? 

Ques.—Is not Hinduism, which teaches belief in a 
personal as well as impersonal God, more 
satisfying to less developed as well as more 
developed’ souls alike than Christianity, 
which teaches only the former? 

Ques.—As materialism, luxury, and intemperance 
have been known to follow in the wake of 
Christianity, how can it appeal to the Hin- 
dus, whose outlook on life and its problems 
is preeminently spiritual? 

Ques.—As Christianity has no system of philosophy 
behind it, but is only a God of ethical con- 


138 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


duct, how is it suited to satisfy the philo- 
sophically minded Hindu race? 

Ques.—If Jesus is only a God-man, as you said yes- 
terday, what better claim has he than other 
equally great God-men like Buddha or Rama, 
Krishna, Pramahamsa, to become a universal 
teacher? 

Ques.—What tests shall I perform, if any, to under- 
stand the saving power of Christ? 


My most difficult moments are not with the 
written questions, but in those meetings where 
oral questions are shot at one. I have been cross- 
examined by as many as thirty lawyers at one 
time trying for hours to beat down the evidence. 
But my verse has been true. I cannot remember 
a single situation in nine years where it has 
failed me. There have been some very close 
calls! For instance, one night a man arose and 
asked, “Can you put your finger on a verse where 
Jesus calls himself the Son of God? Not where 
his disciples or someone else called him that, but 
where he himself did.” A sinking feeling went 
over me. I had a rather hazy notion about where 
there was such a passage, but I couldn’t remem- 
ber just where it was, and he wanted me to put 
my finger on it! I turned to my New Testament 
with a prayer to find that verse. As I opened it 
the first verse my eyes fell upon was an entirely 
different one from the one I was looking for, 


THE QUESTION HOUR 139 


the one where Jesus met the man whom he had 
healed and asked him if he believed on the Son 
of God. The man replied, “Who is he, Lord, that 
I might believe on him?” Jesus replied, “Thou 
hast both seen him, and he it is that speaketh 
unto thee.” I read it off as if I had known about 
it all the time! They never knew the quiet little 
miracle that God had performed to fulfill his 
promise that it should be given in that hour what 
one should speak! But I knew, and thanked him. 

I have found a good many nervous Christians 
since coming home who are afraid that this whole 
thing of Christianity might fall to pieces if some- 
one should get too critical, or if science should 
get too scientific. Many of the saints are now 
painfully nervous. They remind me of a lady 
missionary with whom I walked home one night 
after a very tense meeting in a Hindu theater. 
She said, “Mr. Jones, I am physically exhausted 
from that meeting to-night.” When I asked her 
the reason she said, “Well, I didn’t know what 
they were going to ask you next, and I didn’t 
know what you were going to answer, so I’ve 
been sitting up there in the gallery holding on to 
the bench with all my might for two hours, and 
I’m physically exhausted!” There are many like 
our sister who are metaphorically holding to 
their seats with all their might lest Christianity 
fall to pieces under criticism! 


140 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


I have a great deal of sympathy with them, for 
I felt myself in the same position for a long time 
after I went to India. The whole atmosphere 
was acid with criticism. I could feel the acid 
eat into my very soul every time I picked up a 
non-Christian paper. Then there came the time 
_ when I inwardly let go. I became willing to turn 
Jesus over to the facts of the universe. I began 
to see that there was only one refuge in life and 
that was in reality, in the facts. If Jesus 
couldn’t stand the shock of the criticism of the 
facts discovered anywhere, if he wasn’t reality, 
the sooner I found it out the better. My willing- 
ness to surrender Christ to the facts was almost 
as great an epoch in my life as my willingness to 
surrender to him. In the moment of letting go 
I could almost feel myself inwardly turning pale. 
What would happen? Would the beautiful 
dream fade? To my happy amazement I found 
that he not only stood, but that he shone as never 
before. I saw that he was not a hothouse plant 
that would wither under the touch of criticism, 
but he was rooted in reality, was the very living 
expression of our moral and spiritual universe— 
he was reality itself. 

I have, therefore, taken my faith and have put 
it out before the non-Christian world for these 
seventeen years and have said, “There it is, my. 
brothers, break it if you can.” And the more 


THE QUESTION HOUR 141 


they have smitten upon it the more it has shone. 
Christ came out of the storms and will weather 
them. The only way to kill Christianity is to’ 
take it out of life and protect it. The way to 
make it shine and show its genius is to put it 
down in life and let it speak directly to life itself. 
Jesus is his own witness. The Hindus have 
formed societies called Dharm Raksha Sabhas— 
Societies for the Protection of Religion. Jesus 
does not need to be protected. He needs to be 
presented. He protects himself. 

I could therefore reply to my sister mentioned 
above that in that stormy meeting I had been 
having the time of my life, that I wanted them 
to go into the matter, for if they would only go 
deep enough, they would stand face to face with 
Jesus. For he did not come to bring a way of 
life—he came to be Life itself, and if they went 
deep enough into life, they would find themselves 
facing Jesus, who is Life itself. He did not come 
to bring a set of truths to set alongside of other 
truths, as some have superficially imagined, he 
came to be Truth; and if one goes far enough 
with truth, it will lead him by the hand till he 
faces him who is Truth itself. Dean Inge rightly 
says, “Jesus did not come to bring a religion but 
to be Religion,’ and if we are at all seriously 
religious we will have to be according to his 
mind and spirit or else fail to be religious. In 


142 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


the language of Matthew Arnold, “Jesus is an 
Ultimate.” 

Start in at the thing that you know is worth 
while and follow it back to its final form and see 
where it lands you. For instance, love is a 
worth-while thing in life. We ought to love. 
Then trace love back to its ultimate kind and you 
will not be far from Him who loved as never man 
loved. If purity is a good thing, then start with 
it and go on back and see what kind of ultimate 
purity it brings you to, and you will find yourself 
looking into the eyes of Him who was “the Pur- 
est among the mighty and the Mightiest among 
the pure.” If self-sacrifice is life’s most noble 
quality, then run it back to its finest type and 
you will find yourself gazing upon a cross. 

I am therefore not afraid of the question hour, 
for I believe that Jesus underlies our moral and 
spiritual universe deeper than the force of grav- 
ity underlies our material universe. And al- 
though I know I cannot answer many things— 
for the case is bigger than the pleader—I believe 
that some way, somehow, some time, men’s minds, 
groping like the tendril of the vine that reaches 
out for the wall and finally touching it fastens 
itself upon its solid reality, will ultimately fas- 
ten upon Jesus as that Reality. 

But more difficult to meet than the question 
hour is when they test us not with questions but 


THE QUESTION HOUR 143 


by whether we have truly caught the Christ 
spirit. The big question that India silently and 
relentlessly asks is not how keen a mind has he? 
but has he the mind of Christ? 

This was brought vividly home to me one day 
when two Hindu youths, dressed very plainly 
and in bare feet, came to talk with me. I had 
had many interviews that day, but none of them 
did I enjoy like the hour I had with these young 
men. They were so eager and alert and respon- 
sive. The next day they came again, this time 
to make an explanation. They told me who they 
were—sons of the wealthiest and most prom- 
inent people in the city. They had purposely 
come the day before barefoot and with very poor 
clothes on to test me, to see whether I really 
meant it when I had said the preceding night 
that Jesus looked on people as such, apart from 
race and birth and color and possessions, and 
whether I would practice it in my attitude to- 
ward them dressed in poor clothes! They said 
that they had previously thought of becoming 
Christians and determined to make this a test 
as to whether they would or not. It was all done 
so naively and simply that one could not but feel 
it was genuine, especially when they said they 
were now ready to become Christians. 

This event did not elate me, it sobered me, for 
the serious thought kept haunting me, how easy 


144 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


it would have been to have said the careless 
word and to have assumed a patronizing atti- 
tude—both of which I had often done—when 
so much hung upon the slightest act or atti- 
tude! 

India is asking questions; those that she asks 
with her lips are serious and searching, but of 
far more vital concern are the silent weighings 
and inward judgments of us by which India 
comes to her conclusions about Christ. 

The High Priest asked Jesus “of his disciples 
and of his teaching.” The non-Christian world is 
asking those same two things and always in that 
order. “What life have you?” “What light have 
you?” 

I took my lamp and ‘vent and sat 

Where men of another creed and custom 

Dwelt together in bonds of common search. 

I pressed my lamp close to my bosom, 

Lest adverse winds of thought and criticism, 

And the damp of unsympathy should snuff it out. 
And many a trembling prayer hung upon my lips. 


But I determined that I would love—just love. 

I loved and listened and learned, and now and then 

Threw in a thought or word or observation. 

I heard their gentle speech, saw their mild ways; 

Felt the Hand of Peace rest gently on my soul. 

Here was not the tearing of the flesh, 

Nor the fierce agony of the spirit, in its quest for 
God. 


THE QUESTION HOUR 145 


They gently searched and, through the crevices of 
their thought, 

The light of our Father’s Face streamed in. 

They caught the footfalls of the Mighty Spirit, 

As he moved each moment through palpitating 
Nature. 

And I heard them tune their heart-strings to catch 
the music 

Of God, as he hummed and sang through things. 


But when, in sympathetic talk and mutual quest, 

I asked the learned pundit whether he had found 

A “jiwan mukta,” one who knew deliverance, here 
and now; 

He sadly shook his head and said, “I have not seen.” 

In his voice spoke an aching world: “I have not 
seen.” 

Then there stole within my heart a quiet joy; 

For I saw, amid the search of peoples and races, 

One standing, who, with Chalice in hand, offered here 
and now 

To thirsty souls a crystal draught of life eternal, 

Which, if a man drink, he shall never thirst again. 


Had I not drunk? Had he not put the Chalice 

To my parched lips and, with thirst assuaged, 

Had not my happy soul gone singing down the years? 
A child had thus revealed to him, through prayer and 
Surrender of the mind and will, that for which 

The wise and prudent had vainly searched 

And caught but glimpses; while I, unworthy, 
Stood face to Face. 


As I pondered thus, I glanced, with trembling, at 


my lamp— 
And lo, it burned up brighter than before! 


CHAPTER VIII 
JESUS THROUGH EXPERIENCE 


RELIGION is the life of God in the soul issuing 
in the kingdom of God on earth. But first of all 
it is the life of God in the soul. Religion means 
realization. If not, then religion soon means 
ritual, and that means death. 

The early disciples had little ritual but a 
mighty realization. They went out not remem- 
bering Christ, but realizing him. They did not 
merely call him back into memory, they com- 
muned with him in the deeps. He was not a 
mere fair and beautiful story to remember with 
gratitude—he was a living, redemptive, actual 
Presence then and there. They went out with 
the joyous and grateful cry, “Christ liveth in 
me!’ The Jesus of history had become the Christ 
of experience. They were almost irresistible, for 
they brought certainty into that uncertain world. 
Pliny the Elder had said, “There is nothing cer- 
tain save the absence of certainty,” and Plato 
longed for “some sure word from God” that 
would be a raft to carry him across the uncertain 
seas of human existence. The apostles brought 
certainty. 

146 


JESUS THROUGH. EXPERIENCE 147 


Someone has suggested that the early Chris- 
tians conquered that pagan world because they 
out-thought, they out-lived and they out-died the 
pagans. But that was not enough: they out- 
experienced them. Without that it would have 
lacked the vital glow. If the word of Christ be- 
comes paramount in India, it will be because 
those who follow him out-experience those who 
do not follow him. When Elijah stood upon 
Mount Carmel he made this the test: “The God 
that answers by fire let him be God.” The test 
of the surviving God is now different. We 
say, “The God that answers by producing ra- 
diant healed men let him be God.” It is just 
that certain note that needs to be struck in 
India. Not the note of aggressive dogmatism, 
but the persuasive note of Christian experi- 
ence. 

If, as someone suggests, all great literature is 
autobiography, then all great appeals to the non- 
Christian world must be a witness. Drummond 
would never preach anything that had not first 
gone through his own experience, and Drum- 
mond therefore spoke with power. 

Doctor Farquhar said to me regarding this 
matter: “There are two things that are almost 
irresistible to the Indian mind just now—Christ 
and Christian experience.” I agreed most heart- 
ily, for it was the thing I had been driven to: 


148 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


Christ must be interpreted through Christian 
experience. 

But the Hindu has this reservation: he does 
not feel that a religious experience should be 
shouted from the housetops, he feels that to do 
this would be indelicate and would take away its 
bloom and beauty. Results should be whispered 
to one’s neighbors. Doctor Tagore told me of the 
man whom he had found who had come into a 
great spiritual experience. He asked him if he 
was not going to tell it to the world? “No,” he 
said ; “if it is real, they will come to me.” When 
I told the head pundit of an ashram that I had 
found one Hindu who said he was a jiwan mukta 
—one who had found living salvation—he re- 
plied, “He was not one if he said he was one.” 
I can share the hesitancy of the Hindu when he 
feels the indelicacy of speaking about it. 

But the genius and glory of Christian experi- 
ence is that we have not earned it—it is a gift, 
absolutely undeserved and unmerited. When 
one accepts it he loses all thought of the part he 
has had in it, and rapturously thinks of the 
Giver. It is not boasting, it is testimony. It is 
sharing with others what has been shared with 
us. Weare to be witnesses in behalf of Another. 

The Christ of the Indian Road pauses as he 
passes through the throngs and says, “Who 
touched me?” Knowing what the healing has 


JESUS THROUGH EXPERIENCE 149 


meant to us, we can only acknowledge that our 
trembling touch upon him has meant life to us. 

This lesson of being a witness was burned into 
my very being by a tragic beginning of my Chris- 
tian ministry. When I was called to the min- 
istry I had a vague notion that I was to be God’s 
lawyer—I was to argue his case for him and put 
it up brilliantly. When I told my pastor of my 
call he surprised and thoroughly frightened me 
by asking me to preach my first sermon on a cer- 
tain Sunday night. I prepared very thoroughly, 
for I was anxious to make a good impression and 
argue his case acceptably. There was a large 
crowd there full of expectancy, for they wished 
the young man well. I began on rather a high 
key. I had not gone a half dozen sentences when 
I used a word I had never used before (nor have 
I used it since!)—“indifferentism.” When I 
used that word I saw a college girl in the audi- 
ence put down her head and smile. It so upset 
me that when I came back to the thread of my 
discourse it was gone—absolutely. I do not 
know how long I stood there rubbing my hands 
hoping that something would come back. It 
seemed an age. Finally I blurted out, “Friends, 
I am very sorry, but I have forgotten my ser- 
mon!” I started down the steps leading from 
the pulpit in shame and confusion. This was 
the beginning of my ministry, I thought—a 


150 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


tragic failure. As I was about to leave the pulpit 
a Voice seemed to say to me, “Haven’t I done 
anything for you?” 

“Yes,” I replied, “You have done everything 
for me.” 

“Well,” answered the Voice, “couldn’t you tell 
that?” 

“Yes, I suppose I could,” I eagerly replied. So 
instead of going to my seat I came around in 
front of the pulpit below (I felt very lowly by 
this time and was persuaded I did not belong up 
there!) and said: “Friends, I see I cannot 
preach, but I love Jesus Christ. You know what 
my life was in this community—that of a wild, 
reckless young man—and you know what it now 
is. You know he has made life new for me, and 
though I cannot preach I am determined to love 
and serve him.” At the close a lad came up and 
said, “Stanley, I wish I could find what you have 
found.” He did find it then and there. Heisa 
member of that church now—a fine Christian 
man. No one congratulated me on that sermon 
that night, but after the sting of it had passed 
away, I have been congratulating myself ever 
since. The Lord let me down with a terrible 
thump, but I got the lesson never to be forgotten : 
In my ministry I was to be, not God’s lawyer, 
but his witness. That would mean that there 
would have to be living communion with Christ 


JESUS THROUGH EXPERIENCE 151 


so that there would always be something to pass 
on. Since that day I have tried to witness before 
high and low what Christ has been to an un- 
worthy life. 

India wants to know: What have you found? 
The students of a Hindu college asked me to 
come and to speak to them at the college and 
they suggested the topic: “Tell your own per- 
sonal religious experience.’ Always, on the last 
night of every series, I tell my personal expe- 
rience. They forget many, if not most, of my 
arguments, but they bring up this matter of 
experience again and again. It grips. 

While I was telling of my conversion in 
I noticed a Hindu college professor nodding his 
head with evident delight. At the close he came 
up eagerly, gripped my hand and said: “Oh, that 
is it. It is the new birth we need.” The next 
day he showed me a school book he had written 
for use in government colleges. It was Annota- 
tions on Macaulay’s History of England. Mac- 
aulay has given the Puritans a thrust, saying 
that during the Puritan reign the students, in- 
stead of studying the classics, were interrogated 
as to how and when and in what circumstances 
they received the new birth. This non-Christian 
professor took up Macaulay in the matter and 
in his comments said, “The pity is that Macaulay 
did not understand the new birth.” Then he 





152 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


quoted the whole of the Nicodemus episode and 
finished up by saying, “Alas, the Nicodemuses 
to-day do not understand how these things can 
be.” Here was a non-Christian professor crit- 
icizing a Christian historian for his lack of ap- 
preciation of the new birth! To lead a man like 
that professor we must have something real and 
Vital. 

One day I was in the train with a Hindu law- 
yer, and we discussed, almost argued, for about 
three hours concerning Hindu and Christian 
philosophy and teaching. I saw we were getting 
nowhere, so I turned to him and said, “Would 
you mind my telling you what Christ has done 
for me?” 

He eagerly replied, “No, I would like to hear.” 

When I got through telling of my conversion 
and the subsequent years there were tears in his 
eyes, and he said: “Mr. Jones, you have attained. 
You have reached the last stage of your rebirths. 
You will never be reborn into this world.” 

“That is probably true,” I replied, “for one 
does not have to go through a weary round of 
rebirths as you expect to, for here is the new 
birth open to you—a straight, short-cut to the 
Father.” There was deep earnestness again 
when he said, “I wish I had that.” In his voice 
spoke the voice of India—it is deliverance from 
rebirths that India craves. 


JESUS THROUGH EXPERIENCE 153 


A Hindu student wrote to me, “After attend- 
ing your addresses I want to be a follower of 
Christ, for I now see that my religion is a some- 
what roundabout method of obtaining the king- 
dom of God.” Somewhat roundabout! Yes, 
eight million rebirths, may be. No wonder they 
shrink from such a prospect—from life itself. 
It is a joy to offer the new birth as the way out. 

Here is a letter to me from a Jain student 
which speaks its own message of longing for 
spiritual freedom: 

I have deep faith in my own religion. I believe it 
to be entirely true, but I need not be ashamed to 
tell that it exacts unflinching duty and knows no 
grace. Philosophically it is all right. You may be- 
lieve, according to it, that the Power behind things 
is supremely just and indifferent, but we err we 
know not why, we are led on as it were on the waves 
of sin and mistakes. There are powers too great for 
our frail being, and I wish then that there were a 
God who would be kind to me, who would feel my 
weaknesses and who would extricate me from the 
meshes of sin and temptation. 


Can we come to a young man like that with 
an argument, a doctrine, a superior Book? Un- 
less we can gently and quietly, but with a radi- 
ant positiveness share with that young man our 
own deliverance and victory, we had better not 
come. Has Christ any answer to a letter like 
that? Here is the crux of the whole thing—Has 


154 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


he, or has he not? Some of us, knowing that we 
were there, in that very condition, believe that 
he has. Let me pause here just long enough to 
say that here is where a good deal of present-day 
presentation is weak. That young man needs 
something more than Jesus as Example and 
Teacher. What he needed was not a Sage, but a 
Saviour, not a moral Example but a moral Ex- 
tractor, not a Redirector but a Regenerator, not 
truths but Life. 

In a class of Hindu and Mussulman students 
at the ashram at one of the students 
spoke up suddenly and said, “Sir, would you 
mind telling us what has made your life what it 
is?” It rather shocked me fora moment. It was 
a bolt out of the blue, as there was nothing that 
had led up to this. It was so absolutely spon- 
taneous and real that I could but stop and 
quietly and prayerfully tell them how Christ 
had taken an unworthy broken life, and had 
made it whole again, and had sent my happy 
soul singing its way down these twenty years. 
When I had finished, one of them spoke up and 
said: “Now, sir, we are happy. That is what 
we wanted to hear.” After the class some of 
them came with me to my room and we sat and 
talked for hours about it. In the afternoon some 
of the young ladies wanted an appointment. 
When I asked them what they wanted to talk 





JESUS THROUGH EXPERIENCE 155 


about, one of them answered and said: “We were 
deeply impressed by what you said about your 
own personal experience this morning. Do you 
mind telling us something more about it?” And 
there we sat a long time upon the floor with the 
touch of the living Christ upon us all. Our 
hearts burned within us as we talked with him, 
and about him, by the way. 

The Indian people are as sensitive to spiritual 
things as the electric needle is to the pull of the 
pole. In one place a Hindu committee asked 
not to have questions at the close of the meet- 
ing, “for,” they said, “it disturbs the beautiful 
spiritual atmosphere of the meetings.” I saw a 
Hindu professor go out at the close of the ad- 
dress one night when the questions began. When 
the questions were through and I suggested that 
we might close the meeting with prayer, I saw 
him come in from the veranda. ~ At the close of 
the prayer he came up and thanked me and said: 
“T went out after your address and stood on the 
veranda until the questions were over, for in 
your address you had lifted us to God and I did 
not want that feeling I had in my heart dissi- 
pated or disturbed by the questions, so I waited 
outside for the prayer, since in the prayer you 
made us again realize his presence.” One feels 
awed in the presence of such beautiful spiritual 
sensitiveness as that. 


156 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


A Hindu came up one night after the prayer 
and said, “That was very fine, but why don’t 
you begin the meetings with prayer?” I assented 
and said I would do so the next night. But in 
the anxiety to get in the thick of the battle I 
went into the address without public prayer. 
Of course one could not get into such a tense 
Situation where every word and idea is being 
challenged without preceding it with an hour or — 
more of prayer, but I did not pray publicly. 
While I was speaking I saw a note coming up; 
the chairman handed it over tome. It read, “Sir, 
you forgot to begin your meeting with prayer, 
as you had promised.” I stopped my address, 
acknowledged my fault, prayed, and went on. 
But I never forgot the undertone of spiritual 
yearning which that little incident revealed. 

After I had had a long talk with a Hindu one 
day as he was about to go I suggested that if he 
liked, we might pray together. “Yes,” he said, “TI 
will be glad to do so, but on one condition, and 
that is, that you do not pray for things but only 
for God.” 

“All right, my brother,” I replied, “we will 
not pray for things but only for God,” and we 
did! Could one face that hour without a deep 
sense of need for reality and a joyous sense of 
God? It is not a question as to whether we 
would or would not interpret Christ through ex- 


JESUS THROUGH EXPERIENCE 157 


perience—we must. Or else there is no inter- 
pretation that is adequate or touches the depths 
of the situation. We cannot merely talk about 
Christ to India—we must bring him. He must 
be a living vital reality—closer than breathing 
and nearer than hands and feet. We must be 
“God-bearers.” 

This God-consciousness should be full and 
overflowing. A Hindu lawyer recognized this 
and said to me one day, “What you Christians 
and the church need to-day is a new Pentecost.” 
I knew what he meant—we need Christianity as 
a well of water within us springing up into ever- 
lasting life. Principal Jacks pleads that we get 
back “the lost radiance of the Christian reli- 
gion.” Queer to hear a Hindu and a Unitarian 
both pleading for a new fullness of life akin to 
Pentecost! Even so, Pentecost is normal Chris- 
tianity. But the church is largely subnormal 
and anemic. Because a few have gone up into 
fever and have done queer things in the name of 
this great Sanifying and Sanctifying of the hu- 
man spirit by the inflooding of the Spirit of the 
living Christ, there is no reason why all the rest 
of us should be frightened away into an anzmic 
Christianity. This Christ of the Indian Road 
is saying, “Receive ye the Holy Ghost,” as well 
as “Thy sins are forgiven thee.” 

A friend of mine was preaching in the bazaar 


158 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


in North India when a Hindu came up to him 
and said, “I want to ask a question, not through 
criticism but for information. I have been read- 
ing the New Testament and am especially struck 
with the Acts of the Apostles. These men seemed 
to have had a wonderful power and fullness of 
spiritual life. Sir, have you found what they 
had?” My friend was speechless. Though he 
was a graduate of a university and was a mis- 
sionary, he knew in the inmost depths of being 
that he did not have what the early disciples 
seemed to have found. He went home, fell on his 
knees, yielded himself fully to Christ and found! 
His life became one of the richest and most beau- 
tiful I have ever been privileged to see. When he 
died a few years ago an Indian minister said, 
“It is a good thing that did not die in 
India, for we would have committed the sin of 
worshiping his grave.” 
“India is reading the Bible and wants to know 
whether our Christianity is like that. An Indian 
boy, whose zeal and love were better than his 
English, wrote to me about a great awakening 
they were having: “We are having a great re- 
bible here.’ Not a bad mistake! We need to be 
rebibled—especially at the place of the Acts of 
the Apostles. 

It was said of those early apostles that they 
“testified and preached.” Their preaching was 





JESUS THROUGH EXPERIENCE 159 


throbbing with testimony. Since it came from 
the heart it reached the heart. The last night 
of a series of meetings in South India I spoke 
on “Christ and Certainty.” On the inspiration 
of the moment before closing the meeting I said, 
‘Now there are quite a number of Christians 
here. I would like you to tell before your non- 
Christian friends in a very few words what you 
have found—what has Christ done for you?” 
First of all, there stood up a convert from a low 
caste and told what Christ had done for him. It 
was befitting that he should speak first, for in 
caste-filled India God was taking the weak 
things to confound the mighty, just as it was 
befitting that Carey the cobbler should be the 
first teacher of Brahman India. After him arose 
one who had been a Brahman Hindu and told of 
what he had found. Then, to our surprise, the 
head British official of the district arose and 
said: “Seven years ago I could not have said 
that I had found this that we have been talking 
about here to-night. But seven years ago I 
found it through an old lady, on board ship 
coming out to India.” It was a rich testimony 
from a very Christian life, simply told and mean- 
ing much, for many of the men before him were 
his subordinate officers. Then the leading Ro- 
man Catholic layman of the city testified: “Of 
course I have never spoken in a meeting of this 


160 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


kind before, but I could not sit here and refuse 
to tell before my non-Christian friends what 
Christ is to me. I heard him say to me, ‘Come 
unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, 
and I will give you rest.’ I came. He gave me 
rest.” It was a striking testimony. Now feel 
the accumulated effect of that whole thing. Here 
were low caste and high caste, American and 
Englishman, Protestant and Catholic, telling 
before their Hindu friends what Christ was to 
them. The Hindu chairman of the meeting at 
the close thoughtfully said to me, “I can answer 
most of your arguments, but I do not know what 
to do with this.” 

There in miniature was seen what a united 
witness of the church would mean. Christendom 
is now talking in different directions—a good 
part of the time against others called Christians 
and not much about the Lord—‘finding a pre- 
carious living,” as someone said of the people of 
a certain island, “by washing each other’s 
clothes.” But suppose we should come together 
at the place of our common Lord and would with 
one joyous voice witness of him, what would 
happen—what? Something that would be irre- 
sistible, as it was to that Hindu chairman. 

In speaking of the witness of the lips, I do not 
mean to overlook the fact that it must be a wit- 
ness backed by life. “This man who is to speak 


JESUS THROUGH EXPERIENCE 161 


to-day is back of everything he says,” said the 
chairman of a meeting in introducing a speaker. 
He could have said nothing finer. <A friend of 
mine went into a shoe shop and found the Hindu 
shopkeeper in deep distress. He had lost his 
only son. My friend to comfort him said, “Well, 
my brother, remember in your trouble that God 
is love.’ The Hindu’s face brightened up and 
he said, “Yes, I know God is love.” My friend, 
interested at his evident eagerness, asked, “How 
do you know God is love?” “Oh,” said the 
Hindu, “I worked for Foy sahib in Cawnpore, 
and no one could work for Foy sahib and not 
know God is love.” Here was a witness with 
the whole of life behind it. Forty years of beau- 
tiful living was speaking to the Hindu in his 
hour of distress. 

Christ interpreted through experience and 
backed by fine living is almost irresistible to 
India to-day. 


CHAPTER IX 
WHAT OR WHOM? 


THIS Christian spirit scattered here and there 
in many hearts in India must express itself in 
some kind of corporate relationships. Some kind 
of a church will be the final outcome. We will 
put our Western corporate experience at the 
disposal of the forming church in India and we 
will say to her, “Take as much as you may find 
useful for your purposes, but be first-hand and 
creative and express Christ through your own 
genius.” 

We know that this has its dangers. It might 
be easier to block them off as they do in orphan 
asylums and turn them out on a standard pat- 
tern—easier and more deadly. Some mission- 
aries in their thoroughness have done this in 
their missions. In the theological seminaries 
the students are pumped full of truth. They go 
out to take charge of churches where they grind 
out that truth. In each church in the whole of 
the mission the pastors preach on the same texts, 
read the same lessons, and preach the same ser- 
mons. They go round the circle of truth once in 

162 


WHAT OR WHOM? 163 


three years. Then they begin over again. It is 
all “faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly 
null.” 

Jesus did not do that. He gave himself to 
them. When they got the life they created suit- 
able raiment in which to clothe it. Life was more 
than raiment. 

While we cannot tell what may be the final 
outcome of this expression of the Christ of the 
Indian Road on the part of his followers in 
India, we can see at this distance certain things 
that will be avoided and certain things gained if 
they center everything upon Christ. 

If India keeps this vision clear, she will be 
saved from many of the petty divisions that have 
paralyzed us in great measure. For at the cen- 
tral place of our experience of Jesus we are one. 


It is Christ who unites us; it is doctrines that ——~ 


divide. As someone has suggested, if you ask a 
congregation of Christians, “What do you be- 
lieve?” there will be a chorus of conflicting be- 
liefs, for no two persons believe exactly alike. 
But if the question is asked, “Whom do you 
trust?” then we are together. If the emphasis 
in our approach to Christianity is “What?” then 
it is divisive, but if the emphasis is “Whom?” 
then we are drawn together at the place of this 
Central Magnet. One has the tendency of the 
centrifugal and the other the tendency of the 


164 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


centripetal. He is the hub that holds together in 
himself the divided spokes. 

The church in China has been rent by con- 
troversy. I can see reasons why this has hap- 
pened. While there I was struck with the fact 
that Christianity was, on the whole, presented to 
the Chinese as good teaching, good doctrine, good 
national policy. It seemed to me to lack just 
this Christo-centric emphasis to which we have 
been driven in India. It needed the warm touch 
of the personal Christ to make it tingle with life 
and radiance. At the Central Fire suspicious 
groups could have warmed themselves and would 
have felt the glow of comradeship as they did so. 

Christianity with a what-emphasis is bound 
to be divisive, but this tendency is lessened with 
a Whom-emphasis. Note the things that have 
created denominations in the West: baptism, hu- 
man freedom, rites, ceremonies, church govern- 
ment, dress, orders—the points of division have 
been nearly all “whats.” The church divided 
once over the “Whom,” namely, in the Unitarian 
issue. Here it had a right to divide, for the ques- 
tion of who Jesus is is vital and decisive. Every- 
thing is bound up with that question. 

This question of who Jesus is was thrown into 
the very center of the church in India in recent 
years. One keen Indian minister’s discovery of 
the modern method rather went to his head and 


WHAT OR WHOM? 165 


landed him in a Unitarian position. He threw 
the whole matter into the Indian church for air- 
ing. Some of us held our breath as we watched 
the controversy rage back and forth in one of 
the papers for several years. The missionaries 
practically stood out of it and let the growing 
church come to its own conclusions as to who her 
Lord is. In the beginning the brother of Uni- 
tarian views had the center and held it. But 
gradually a change came, and when the battle 
was over, our brother and his views had been 
pushed to the margin and a divine Christ occu- 
pied the center. By the sheer force of his own 
Person he had shone into the situation and had 
clarified it. The Indian church has fought her 
first battle—she knows who her Lord is, not 
merely through what the missionaries had said, 
but because she has thought it through for her- 
self. It was a living victory. At the close she 
knelt at his feet with a joy unknown before, say- 
ing, “My Lord and my God.” This victory came 
not by dogmatic assertion, but by painstaking 
methods of careful and prayerful research. 
Now, the significant thing was this, that at 
the end of the battle men of liberal and conserva- 
tive minds had been drawn together at Him. He 
held them both. The problem of unity will be 
well on the way to solution if the Indian church 
makes Christ central and all else marginal. 


166 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


Some of the other problems that are now vex- 
ing the mind of the West will not vex us if we 
keep this Christocentric emphasis. Christianity 
cannot be really understood with a what-empha- 
sis, but it can be understood with a Whom-em- 
phasis. Take the whole question of the super- 
naturalness of Christianity. It claims to be a 
supernatural system. Now, as men’s minds have 
discovered a universe of law this idea of a super- 
naturally imposed system seemed less and less 
credible until the attempt has been made to ra- 
tionalize the whole system, explain away the 
miracles and reduce the whole thing to natural 
law. But in Christianity we are not discussing 
miracles in the light of natural law but in the 
light of the personality of Jesus, and that makes 
a difference—a very great one. The question is, 
Would miracles happen around such a person- 
ality as Jesus? 

Now, we used to go at it something like this: 
Jesus was born in a supernatural way, he did 
supernatural things, he arose in a supernatural 
manner, therefore he was a supernatural Person. 
The miracles carried Jesus—the what carried 
the Whom. This is obviously weak. It sends 
the minds of men to the whats, where they wran- 
gle over them and only incidentally get to the 
Whom. If we were wiser, we would ask men to 
lay aside the question of birth and miracle for 


WHAT OR WHOM? 167 


a moment, until they get under the sway of this 
Person. Let them catch the force of this Mind 
and Soul into which no impurity had ever en- 
tered, no sin had ever marred, let them feel the 
touch of him upon them, and then let them turn 
from the standpoint of this Person to the ques- 
tion of miracles, and they become credible in the. 
light of what he is. In the light of natural law 
miracle seems absurd, but in the light of this 
person of Jesus it becomes the most natural of 
things. 

I once asked Professor Dreisch, the great Ger- 
man philosopher and exponent of “Vitalism,” 
this question: ‘““Whenever you get a higher type 
of life do you not expect that around that life 
there will be a higher type of manifestation?” 
He assented to this, and I asked him further, 
“If Jesus represents a higher type of being, 
would you not have to make room in your think- 
ing that around that life would be a higher type 
of doing which to us on a lower plane might be 
considered miracle?” He replied: “Yes, if Jesus 
represents a higher type of being, I would have 
to make room in my thinking that around that 
life would be the possibility of what might seem 
to us on a lower plane miracle. But it would 
have to be examined scientifically.” Precisely! 

We are willing to rest everything on the ques- 
tion of whether or not Jesus represented a higher 


168 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


type of being. There is only one way to settle it: 
Stand before Jesus in inward moral surrender 
and obedience and see if you can feel that what 
you stand before is mere human nature. If he is 
human nature, then we are not—we are sub- 
human, for he stands above saint as well as sin- 
ner. Professor Hogg, who has companioned with 
this Christ of the Indian Road for many years 
and knows him well, puts the matter in these 
burning words: “When, as detached bystanders, 
we look upon his features, as it were, in profile, 
considering them singly and in repose, we seem 
to find none that is not human, none at least that 
does not belong to the nature which God designed 
for man. But let us move in front and catch 
his glance, so that the personality which lived 
by means of these human endowments may pierce 
our consciousness with a look in which its eager 
passion and its tender pity, its searching purity 
and its gracious comprehendingness, its assur- 
ance of a world-redeeming vocation and its unaf- 
fected neighborliness, its kingly demands and 
its selfless devotion, make simultaneous impact 
on our souls, and we shall then lose all intent 
to measure or to classify; we shall know our- 
selves in the presence of the utterly unique— 
One who exacts worship instead of submitting 
to appraisal. Merely look at Jesus, and you 
behold a Man. But meet him face to face in the 


WHAT OR WHOM? 169 


inwardness of comradeship and obedience, of 
faltering need and kingly succor, and you know 
yourself to be meeting the very Person, the very 
Self of God. I do not explain this; I simply 
testify” (Redemption From This World, Hogg, 
pp. 65, 66). And who that has tried it has not 
felt what Professor Hogg so graphically ex- 
pressed ? 

Here is the central miracle of Christianity: 
Christ. The central miracle is not the resurrec- 
tion or the virgin birth or any of the other mir- 
acles; the central miracle is just this Person, 
for he rises in sinless grandeur above life. He is 
life’s Sinless Exception, therefore a miracle. 
Now, turn from that Central Miracle toward 
these lesser miracles and they become credible 
in the light of his Person. Being what he was, 
it would be amazing if he did not touch blind 
eyes and make the lame to walk. These miracles 
fit in with the central miracle of his Person. 
“Being a miracle, it would be a miracle if he 
did not perform miracles.” The miracles do not 
carry Jesus—he carries them. The “whom” car- 
ries the “what,” the Person carries the manifes- 
tation. But say miracle apart from him and it 
is confusing. 

From this standpoint let us approach the 
vexed question of the virgin birth. Discuss “vir- 
gin birth” apart from Jesus and it seems in- 


170 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


credible and absurd, but connect it with him and 
it fits in with the whole and becomes credible. 
Let it be said at once that I do not base his 
divinity on how he was born. If it had been said 
that he was born in an ordinary way and | still 
saw in him what I now see in him, I would still 
believe in him as divine. Not how he came into 
the world, but what he was after he got here is 
the most important thing. But in the light of 
his Person I see no difficulty whatever in beliey- 
ing in the virgin birth. Since he rose above life 
in sinless grandeur, it becomes possible to believe 
that he arose above the ordinary processes of 
birth. “The virgin life of Jesus makes it possi- 
ble to believe in the virgin birth of Jesus.” An 
Arya Samajist asked me if I could produce in 
human history another example of the virgin 
birth. I replied that I could not, for I could 
not produce another Jesus Christ. He was the 
Unique, and therefore did the unique. 

A converted Jew was talking to an uncon- 
verted Jew when the latter asked, “Suppose there 
were a son born among us and it were claimed 
that he was born of a virgin, would you believe 
it?” The converted Jew very thoughtfully re- 
plied, “I would if he were such a Son.” That is 
the point. He makes it possible to believe in it. 
But the virgin birth does not carry Jesus; he 
carries it. When the emphasis is on the whom 


WHAT OR WHOM? 171 


then the how becomes credible. But turn it the 
other way and it is dark and difficult. 

In regard to the resurrection the same thing 
holds. Jesus rose above life. This makes it per- 
fectly credible that he would rise above death. 
Two things take us all—sin and death. Jesus 
conquered the first—our own inward moral con- 
sciousness being witness. Will he conquer the 
second? It would be surprising if he did not. 
I say it reverently: If Jesus did not rise from 
the dead, he ought to have done so. The whole 
thing would come out wrong if the grave had 
held him captive. When the broken and dispirited 
disciples, now radiant with a wild hope, whis- 
pered to each other, “He is risen,” they were 
simply echoing what his whole life had done. 
Throughout his life he arose. Where we sank, 
he arose. The resurrection fits in with that fact. 
There must be an empty tomb where there is 
such a fullness of Life. Jesus carries the resur- 
rection. 

Christianity breaks into meaning when we see 
Jesus. The incredible becomes the actual; the 
impossible becomes the patent. 

Do not misunderstand me. The whats of 
Christianity are important. A body of doctrine is 
bound to grow up around him. We cannot do 
without doctrine, but I am so anxious for the 
purity of doctrine that I want it to be held in 


172 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


the white light of his Person and under the con- 
stant corrective of his living Mind. The only 
place where we can hold our doctrines pure is _ 
to hold them in the light of his countenance. 
Here their defects are at once apparent, but only 
here. 

But we must hold in mind that no doctrine, 
however true, no statement, however correct, 
no teaching, however pure, can saveaman. ‘We 
are saved by a Person and only by a Person, and, 
as far as I know, by only one Person,” said 
Bishop McDowell. Only Life can lift life. A 
doctor lay dying—a Christian doctor sat beside 
him and urged him to surrender and have faith 
in Christ. The dying doctor listened in amaze- 
ment. Light dawned. He joyously said, “All 
my life I have been bothered with what to be- 
lieve, and now I see it is whom to trust.” Life 
lifted life. 

But further, we shall soon see that as we draw 
closer to him we shall be closer to each other in 
doctrine. Suppose the essence of Christianity 
is in utter devotion to Jesus, and truly following 
him is the test of discipleship, will not such doc- 
trine as the new birth take on new meaning? 
If I am to follow such as he, I must be born again 
and born different. A new birth is a necessary 
beginning for this new life. And as for the doc- 
trines of sanctification and the fullness of the 


WHAT OR WHOM? 173 


Spirit, apart from him, they may become hollow 
cant, as they, in fact, have often become; but in 
the business of following Jesus they become, not 
maximum attainments, but minimum necessities. 
If I am to follow him, he will demand my all, and 
I shall not want to offer him less. Holiness has 
been preached very often until it has become a 
synonym for hollowness. The word has got 
loosed from Christ and has lost its meaning. 
Had it kept close to Christ, we would have 
preached less holiness and more of a Christ who 
makes men holy. 

Surely, it is not difficult to believe in atone- 
ment when we think of Christ. Would such love 
as that let us go? Would he not go to the limit 
for us? Put all the content in the word “atone- 
ment” you can and it still but faintly tells what 
Jesus would do for men. 

As for the inspiration of the Scriptures, it 
takes a deepened meaning from him. Discuss 
the matter of the mechanics of it apart from 
Jesus and it often becomes a haggle, but dis- 
cuss it with our gaze upon him and it becomes a 
necessity. It was inconceivable that such a per- 
son as Jesus could have come out of an unin- 
spired or an ordinarily inspired Book. The 
ideas, the conceptions, the Person is too lofty to 
have been conceived by human intelligence how- 
ever lofty it might have been. Just as he, being 


174 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


the miracle that he was, created miracles around 
him in human nature and the physical universe, 
so also around him would be created the miracle 
in human intelligence and insight, until things 
which “eye had not seen, nor ear heard, neither 
have entered into the heart of man,’ would be 
given forth to the world under the sway of that 
Person. 

But the statement made above about Jesus 
coming out of an uninspired Book must be cor- 
rected a bit, for Jesus did not come out of the 
Book; it came out of him. It did not create him; 
he created it. 

And since, as someone has suggested, litera- 
ture can never rise higher than life—for life puts 
content and meaning into the literature—so you 
cannot get a better Book until you get a better 
life than the life of Jesus. 

The strongest way to hold to the inspiration 
of the Scriptures is to hold to the Person. 

\.~ We must call men not to loyalty to a belief but 
loyalty to a Person. We may be loyal to a belief 
and be dead spiritually, but we cannot be loyal 
to this Person and be other than alive spirit- 
ually. He creates belief. He is the great Be- 
liever himself, and in the light of his radiant 
faith we cannot but believe. But we do not get 
Jesus from our beliefs, we get our beliefs from 


WHAT OR WHOM? 175 


Jesus. And they must of necessity be under con- 
stant correction by his mind and spirit. 

If some are afraid of what might happen if we 
were to give India Jesus without hard-and-fast 
systems of thought and ecclesiastical organiza- 
tion, lest the whole be corrupted, let our fears be 
allayed. Jesus is well able to take care of him- 
self. He trusted himself to the early disciples, 
who were no better and no worse than the Indian 
people; and having got hold of him they went 
forth in that name with power. Having little 
ecclesiastical system, little body of set doctrine, 
they created their own forms out of the passion 
of love they had for him. These forms were real 
because they came out of the white heat of that 
passion. They expressed life. We believe that 
India will fall intensely in love with the Christ 
of the Indian Road, that love will turn to glad 
submission to him as Saviour and Lord, that out 
of that loving submission will come a new radi- 
ant expression of him in thought and life. 

We who feel that we must be steadiers of the 
ark must remember that Jesus can take care of 
himself, even in moments when there seems most 
to fear. He fell into the hands of his Jewish 
enemies—and lo, there was an atonement and a 
resurrection! Are we afraid to have him fall 
into the hands of his Indian friends? Will he 
be swallowed up? Never mind, he was swal- 


176 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


lowed up once before and there was a resurrec- 
tion. There may be another! I only know that 
since he has come into India’s thought and life 
everywhere there is the cracking of old things 
and the breaking up of dead forms. It looks to 
us as though there is a resurrection taking place 
now! 

There is no real danger lest Jesus be lost 
among the many in all this, that it may end up 
in his being put in the Pantheon of Hinduism. 
Greece and Rome tried that and the Pantheons 
amid which he was placed are gone—Jesus lives 
on. He is dynamic, disruptive, explosive like the 
soft tiny rootlets that rend the monuments of 
man’s pride. Like the rootlets he quietly and 
unobtrusively goes down into the crannies of 
men’s thinking, and lo, old forms and customs 
are broken up. Absorb him? You may as well 
talk about the moist earth in springtime absorb- 
ing the seed! The seed absorbs it, for it is life. 
Jesus is Life. He will take care of himself. 

“Give us Jesus,” said a Hindu to me, ‘just 
Jesus. Do not be afraid that we will make a 
human Jesus out of him, for his divinity will 
shine out of its own accord.” 

At any rate there never was a situation in 
which Jesus was not Master, and never more so 
than when he was upon the cross, and even in 
the tomb. He will be Master upon the Indian 


WHAT OR WHOM? 177 


Road—yes, even at the crossroads of India where 
rival creed and clashing thought flow at cross 
purposes. 


“Where cross the crowded ways of life, 
Where sound the cries of race and clan, 
Above the noise of selfish strife, 
We hear thy voice, O Son of man.” 


CHAPTER X 
CHRIST AND THE OTHER FAITHS 


As Christ meets India and her past what is his 
demand? 

When Mohammedanism confronted Hinduism 
the demand was of absolute surrender—a com- 
plete wiping of the slate of the past and the dic- 
tates of the prophet written in its stead. It is 
no wonder that Hinduism withstood it, and does 
withstand it, for its very life and past are in- 
volved. 

Does Jesus take that same attitude? Are his 
demands upon India the same as Mohammed? 
Is the slate to be wiped clean and the past abso- 
lutely blotted out? 

It must be confessed that this has often been 
the attitude and demand of the Christian mis- 
sionary. If Christianity is more or less identi- 
fied with Western civilization and presented as 
such, or if it is a system of church government 
and a more or less fixed theological system, 
blocked off and rigid and presented as such, then 
I do not see how we can escape the attitude of 
the Mohammedan. The past must be wiped out 

178 


CHRIST AND THE OTHER FAITHS 179 


and a clean slate presented for our theological 
systems, our ecclesiastical organizations, and our 
civilization to be written in its stead. 

But if our message be Christ, and Christ alone, 
then this does not necessarily follow. He may 
turn to India as he turned to Judaism and say, 
“T came not to destroy but to fulfill.’ Just as 
he gathered up in his own life and person every- 
thing that was fine and beautiful in Jewish teach- 
ing and past and gave it a new radiant expres- 
sion, so he may do the same with India. The fact 
is that the words that he used would imply that, 
for it is a generic term: “I came not to destroy 
but to fulfill.” It is locally applied to the Law 
and the Prophets, but capable of a wider applica- 
tion to truth found anywhere. 

There is no doubt that devout Hindus who see 
worth-while and beautiful things in their faith 
are deeply concerned as they see the decay of that 
faith and wonder what the future will bring. 
Hindus themselves frankly tell of that decay, 
but always with a pang. The brilliant Hindu 
editor of a newspaper in India said, “It is with 
a pang that I see Hinduism decaying and dying. 
... But I know how the Dhoms (outcastes) 
feel, for I myself am an outcaste.” He had been 
outcasted on his return from foreign study and 
spoke out of a bitter experience. 

The Hindu census commissioner of Baroda in 


180 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


his report of 1921 states, “Hinduism perhaps 
more than other faiths shows on its social side 
and its religious practices increasing signs of 
disintegration.” 

This open letter to M. T. Sheshagiri Aiyar, 
Member Legislative Assembly, who introduced 
legislation concerning the use of endowments to 
temples, appeared in The Hindu Message, an or- 
thodox paper: “I belong to the orthodox section 
of Hinduism. .. . I believe that you are aware 
that the orthodox section, though in the majority, 
are weak, disorganized, and voiceless. They be- 
long to a rapidly dying race. In a generation or 
two at the most they will be nowhere, and re- 
formers like your esteemed self will have a 
smooth way in seeking your cherished objects. 
It is exactly therefore you that should show some 
compassion toward the orthodox community and 
allow it to pass away without feeling agony, for 
chivalry does not consist in striking a fallen foe. 
... In your recent bill which has become the 
law of the land you have not provided for reli- 
gious efficacy, but simply took compassion on 
what you consider to be the woeful position of 
women and have shed pious tears. Thus you 
have helped to destroy the fabric of the ancient 
Hindu institutions. ... Though weak, the or- 
thodox has to live in this world until he is thor- 
oughly exterminated, and until then he is 


CHRIST AND THE OTHER FAITHS 181 


destined to struggle for life.’ That letter tells 
its own story. 

This scene also has its own inner meaning. 
I was sitting in the train one day when two 
members of the Legislative Council for Madras 
began a heated conversation. One was a Brah- 
man and the other a non-Brahman, both able 
men. They talked partly to me and partly at each 
other. I remained outwardly neutral. The non- 
Brahman in the midst of the argument said, 
“Yes, there was a time when we would wash your 
sacred feet and drink the water to purify our- 
selves, but now our eyes have been opened and 
we have thrown you over.” 

“Yes,” replied the Brahman, “you have, and 
with it you have thrown over your religion.” 

“Well,” shot back the other, “if this is reli- 
gion, then religion be damned!” 

There is no doubt that Brahmanism as a re- 
ligion centering in the Brahman is being slowly 
undermined—very rapidly so, some would say. 
This feeling is at the back of the Brahman at- 
tack upon Gandhi for his anti-untouchability 
campaign. 

A keen Hindu put the matter to me in rather 
vulgar but vivid language: “Christianity is in- 
creasing and Hinduism is dying—damn it!’ 

When he says that Hinduism is dying it must 
be qualified a bit. Some of the outward prac- 


182 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


tices of Hinduism are dying, but there are behind 
these practices some ideas that constitute the 
living spirit of Hinduism and have made it sur- 
vive through the centuries. Caste and idolatry 
and Brahmanism will drop away, but there will 
be left what will constitute the core of the Indian 
heritage. It will be worth preserving. A lady 
in Baltimore found some seeds in the hands of 
an Egyptian mummy and planted them. Morn- 
ing glories came up. In the hand of the mum- 
mied forms and customs of Hinduism I think 
there are five living seeds: (1) That the ulti- 
mate reality is spirit. (2) The sense of unity 
running through things. (3) That there is jus- 
tice at the heart of the universe. (4) A passion 
for freedom. (5) The tremendous cost of the 
religious life. I do not believe that the world 
can afford to lose those five things so deeply im- 
bedded in India’s thought and life. 

It is worth something that a nation is com- 
mitted to the thought that the ultimate real is 
spirit. As Bernard Lucas says, ““We of the West 
posit the material and infer the spiritual, but 
India posits the spiritual and infers the ma- 
terial.” India is sure that the spiritual is real, 
but not quite sure that the material is, in any 
sense, a reality. Is that not an outlook on life 
that may have been providentially held to be 
loosed upon the world just at the time when 


CHRIST AND THE OTHER FAITHS 1838 


materialism is so rampant and deadening? 
Again, is it worth while to preserve that sense 
of the unity of things? India has gone too far 
and has slipped into pantheism—everything 
God—but that will be corrected to a panentheism 
—everything in God. This will bring us a sense 
of the unity of all life. It should make a more 
friendly and meaningful and kindly universe. 
Again, is it worth while that India feels that at 
the heart of things is a strict and unfailing jus- 
tice? The ironlike and heartless inhumanities 
that have grown up around the thought of karma 
will be modified and cleansed away, but this 
thought that strict justice is at the heart of 
things may tend to correct a good deal of our ten- 
dencies toward an easy forgiveness. Then the 
passion for inner freedom, the craving to break 
the thralidom of the outward and the seeming— 
that is a beautiful passion that has beat in the 
soul of India, and, corrected by the passion for 
the freedom of others, will make a great contri- 
bution to our collective life. But above all, India 
standing for the tremendous cost of the religious 
life, that religion demands all and holds all, will 
correct much of our compartmentalized and 
tentative religious thinking and acting. It 
should bring us abandon. 

The shell of Hinduism breaks and falls away 
and leaves us these values. How can they be 


184 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


preserved? This is of vital interest to both 
East and West. 

I do not think that they can be preserved 
through the old forms. They are falling away. 
They cannot be revived. A new mold and motive 
must be supplied for them: “The seat of au- 
thority must be new,” says Maciver in another 
connection, but applicable here. “Insofar as the 
external sanctions fall away and cease to be de- 
terminants of men’s conduct, it is no use any 
more binding them back to these and attempting 
to supply them with motives. They must at- 
tain to a new unity of life—they cannot regain 
the old” (R. M. Maciver, Community, p. 300). 
Now where will that “new unity of life” be 
found? 

Hindus themselves are beginning to see where 
it will be. Catch the significance of this scene _ 
and question. In the Brahmans took 
absolute charge of our meetings. They sent out 
the notices through government chaprasis, or 
runners. They decided to have the meetings in 
the inclosed compound of a Hindu temple—an 
unheard-of place to hold a Christian meeting. 
It was specially decorated with streamers for 
the occasion. Hindu ushers ushered in the 
crowd and the leading Hindu of the city was the 
chairman of the meetings. Since there was no 
Christian to interpret for me they gave me a 





CHRIST AND THE OTHER FAITHS 185 


Hindu interpreter, a man of beautiful spirit and 
keen mind. He interpreted in a very dignified 
manner the first night, holding his hands on his 
cane in front of him, but the second night he so 
caught the spirit of things that he began ges- 
ticulating exactly as I was doing! When I was 
about half way through my address the first 
night the temple bells began to ring and the 
conch shells to blow for evening worship. As 
the temple was within a few feet of us there was 
a terrible racket. I could scarcely hear myself 
talk. I stood there nonplussed, when a Hindu 
gentleman arose and said: “Sir, just sit down. 
It will all be over in ten minutes; we will sit here 
and wait.” Isat down. Nota half dozen people 
of that great crowd went into the temple. They 
sat and waited. It was all over in five or six 
minutes, and I resumed as though nothing had 
happened. The next night I spoke on the “Uni- 
versality of Jesus.” At the close a Hindu law- 
yer arose and asked this question: “Don’t you 
think that Hinduism will gradually evolve and 
change into Christianity without losing its good 
points?” I assured him that I thought that very 
thing was taking place! He saw that there was 
a constant drift away from the old and he was 
anxious that its good points should be preserved. 
I could assure him from my heart that Jesus 
came not to destroy that good, but to preserve it. 


186 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


This new unity of life that India must have—is 
it Christ? It is. 

A leading Hindu lawyer of Madras expressed 
his belief in that conclusion in these words: “The 
reinvigoration of Hinduism is only possible 
through the Christ spirit.” A Hindu High Court 
judge put it even more pointedly: “Christ is the 
only hope of Hinduism.” 

Would these ideas that form the finest things 
in India’s past find new life should they die into 
Christianity? Would they be expressed in a 
new living way? Would Christ be the new mold 
and motive? 

I believe that “these divine ideas which had 
wandered through the world until they had 
almost forgot their divine origin will at last 
clothe themselves in flesh and blood, the idea and 
the fact will meet together and will be wedded 
henceforth and forevermore.” Jesus is that flesh 
and blood in which they will reclothe themselves, 
and that Fact in which the ideas will find living 
expression. 

The réle of the iconoclast is easy, but the 
role of the one wko carefully gathers up in him- 
self all spiritual and moral values in the past 
worth preserving is infinitely more difficult and 
infinitely more valuable. Hence we can go to 
the East and thank God for the fine things we 
may find there, believing that they are the very 


CHRIST AND THE OTHER FAITHS 187 


footprints of God. He has been there before us. 
Everywhere that the mind of man has been open, 
through the crevices of that mind the light of 
God has shone in. That scattered light which 
lighted every man that came into the world was 
focused in the person of Jesus, and the Life be- 
came the Light of men. 

To see how Jesus remarkably fulfills the finest 
striving of both East and West note the ends of 
life discovered by the Greeks and those discov- 
ered by the Hindus and the announcement that 
Jesus made about himself. The Greeks were the 
brain of Europe and did its philosophic think- 
ing, just as the Hindus are the brain of Asia and 
have done the philosophic thinking for Asia. The 
Greeks said the ends of life were three: the 
Good, the True, and the Beautiful. The Hin- 
dus also say the ends of life are three: Gyana, 
Bhakti, and Karma. With this difference that 
the Hindus were the more religious people and 
made these ends means—the end was Brahma, 
the means to attain that were the three ways: the 
Gyana Marga, the way of knowledge; the Bhakti 
Marga, the way of devotion or emotion; the 
Karma Marga, the way of works or deeds. 

Jesus stood between the Greeks and the Hin- 
dus, midway between East and West, and made 
this announcement, “I am the Way, the Truth, 
and the Life.’ Turning toward the Greeks he 


188 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


says, “I am the Way”—a method of acting—the 
Greek’s Good; “I am the Truth”’—the Greek’s 
True; “I am the Life’—the Greek’s Beautiful, 
for Life is beauty—plus. Turning toward the 
Hindus he says, “I am the Way’—the Karma 
Marga, a method of acting; “I am the Truth’— 
the Gyana Marga—the method of knowing; “I 
am the Life’—the Bhakti Marga—the method of 
emotion, for Life is emotion—plus. 
- Jesus thus says: “I am the Good, the Beauti- 
ful, and the True; I am Gyana, Bhakti, and 
Karma, for I am the Way, the Truth, and the 
Life.” 

The Greeks’ ends were only beautiful ideas 
before Jesus made them fact. “Ideas are poor 
ghosts,” says George Eliot, “until they become 
incarnate.” Then they look out at us from sad 
eyes and touch us with strong hands; then they 
become a power. Only as the Word becomes 
flesh does it move us. “The Universal Beauty 
must create a picture before I can say, I see. 
Universal Goodness must perform an action be- 
fore I can say, I love. Universal Truth must 
have a biography before I can say, I understand.” 
Jesus is that Universal Beauty become a Picture, 
that Universal Goodness become an Act, that 
Universal Truth become a Biography. He is the 
concrete universal. 

The Gyana Marga is devotion to an Idea; the 


CHRIST AND THE OTHER FAITHS 189 


Karma Marga is devotion to a Code; the Bhakti 
Marga is devotion to a Person. Jesus is that 
Idea become a Fact, the code is now a Character, 
the person, the Supreme Person. 

But Jesus not only faces the Greeks and the 
Hindus; he faces human personality everywhere 
and fulfills it. The modern thinker analyzes per- 
sonality into Intellect, Feeling, and Will. Jesus 
says: “I am the Way’—here is the response of 
the Will; “I am the Truth’”—here is the response 
of the Intellect; “I am the Life’—here is the re- 
sponse of the Feeling. Jesus is the great 
“Amen,” the great “Yes” to human personality. 
He is its fulfillment, since he is the Supreme 
Person. 

But more, he faces all thought and culture of 
all ages of the world and says, “I am the Way”— 
that is Ethics; “I am the Truth’—that is Philos- 
ophy; “I am the Life”—that is Religion. Jesus 
is Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion, for he is 
Life, and Life includes all these and overflows 
them. He is the Word that sums up all other 
words. 

But someone objects—then all these things 
were here before him. There was nothing new 
in him. Mackintosh tells of an antiquarian who 
shows his friend how one by one the characteris- 
tic features of Greek sculpture had been antici- 
pated by the Assyrians, the Hittites and the 


190 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


Egyptians, and he exclaimed in triumph that the 
Greeks had, in fact, invented nothing. ‘“Noth- 
ing,” rejoined the other, “except the Beautiful.” 
Jesus invented nothing new? He himself was 
the new. 


CHAPTER XI 
THE CONCRETE CHRIST 


INDIA is the land of mysticism. You feel it in 
the very air. Jesus was the supreme mystic. The 
Unseen was the real to him. He spent all night 
in prayer and communion with the Father. He 
lived in God and God lived in him. When he 
said, “I and the Father are one” you feel it is so. 

Jesus the mystic appeals to India, the land of 
mysticism. But Jesus the mystic was amazingly 
concrete and practical. Into an atmosphere 
filled with speculation and wordy disputation 
where “men are often drunk with the wine of 
their own wordiness” he brings the refreshing 
sense of practical reality. He taught, but he 
did not speculate. He never used such words as 
“perhaps,” “may be,” “I think so.” Even his 
words had a concrete feeling about them. They 
fell upon the soul with the authority of certainty. 

He did not discourse on the sacredness of 
motherhood—he suckled as a babe at his moth- 
er’s breast, and that scene has forever conse- 
crated motherhood. 

He did not argue that life was a growth and 

19h 


192 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


character an attainment—he “grew in wisdom 
and stature, and in favor with God and man.” 

He did not speculate on why temptation 
should be in this world—he met it, and after 
forty days’ struggle with it in the wilderness he 
conquered, and “returned in the power of the 
Spirit to Galilee.” 

He did not discourse on the dignity of labor— 
he worked at a carpenter’s bench and his hands 
were hard with the toil of making yokes and 
plows, and this forever makes the toil of the 
hands honorable. 

We do not find him discoursing on the neces- 
sity of letting one’s light shine at home among 
kinsmen and friends—he announced his program 
of uplift and healing at Nazareth, his own home, 
and those who heard “wondered at the words of 
grace which proceeded out of his mouth.” 

As he came among men he did not try to prove 
the existence of God—he brought him. He lived 
in God and men looking upon his face could not 
find it within themselves to doubt God. 

He did not argue, as Socrates, the immortal- 
ity of the soul—he raised the dead. 

He did not speculate on how God was a Trin- 
ity—he said, “If I by the Spirit of God cast out 
devils, the kingdom of God is come nigh unto 
you.” Here the Trinity—“I,” “Spirit of God” 
“God”—was not something to be speculated 


THE CONCRETE CHRIST 193 


about, but was a Working Force for redemption 
—the casting out of the devils and the bringing 
in of the Kingdom. 

He did not teach in a didactic way about the 
worth of children—he put his hands upon them 
and blessed them and setting one in their midst 
tersely said, “Of such is the kingdom of God,” 
and he raised them from the dead. 

He did not argue that God answers prayer— 
he prayed, sometimes all night, and in the morn- 
ing “the power of the Lord was present to heal.” 

He did not paint in glowing colors the beauties 
of friendship and the need for human sympathy 
—he wept at the grave of his friend. 

He did not argue the worth of womanhood and 
the necessity for giving them equal rights—he 
treated them with infinite respect, gave to them 
his most sublime teaching, and when he arose 
from the dead he appeared first to a woman. 

He did not teach in the schoolroom manner the 
necessity of humility—he “girded himself with 
a towel and kneeled down and washed his disci- 
ples’ feet.” 

He did not discuss the question of the worth 
of personality as we do to-day—he loved and 
served persons. 

He did not discourse on the equal worth of 
personality—he went to the poor and outcast 
and ate with them. 


194 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


He did not prove how pain and sorrow in the 
universe could be compatible with the love of 
God—he took on himself at the cross everything 
that spoke against the love of God, and through 
that pain and tragedy and sin showed the very 
love of God. 

He did not discourse on how the weakest hu- 
man material can be transformed and made to 
contribute to the welfare of the world—he called 
to him a set of weak men, as the Galilean fisher- 
men, transformed them and sent them out to 
begin the mightiest movement for uplift and re- 
demption the world has ever seen. 

He wrote no books—only once are we told that 
he wrote and that was in the sand—but he wrote 
upon the hearts and consciences of people about 
him and it has become the world’s most precious 
writing. 

He did not paint a Utopia, far off and unreal- 
izable—he announced that the kingdom of 
heaven is within us, and is “at hand” and can be 
realized here and now. 

John sent to him from the prison and asked 
whether he was the one who was to come or 
should they look for another? Jesus did not 
argue the question with the disciples of John— 
he simply and quietly said, “Go tell John what 
you see, the blind receive sight, the deaf hear, 
the lame walk, and the poor have the gospel 


THE CONCRETE CHRIST 195 


preached to them.” His arguments were the 
facts produced. 

He did not discourse on the beauty of love— 
he loved. 

We do not find him arguing that the spiritual 
life should conquer matter—he walked on the 
water. 

He greatly felt the pressing necessity of the 
physical needs of the people around him, but he 
did not merely speak in their behalf—he fed five 
thousand people with five loaves and two fishes. 

They bring in to him a man with a double 
malady—sick in body and stricken more deeply 
in his conscience because of sin. Jesus attended 
first of all to the deepest malady and said, “Thy 
sins are forgiven thee.” In answer to the ob- 
jections of the people he said, ‘Which is easier 
to say, Thy sins are forgiven thee? or to say, 
Take up thy bed and walk? And that they might 
know that the Son of man had power on earth to 
forgive sins, he said to the palsied man, Take 
up thy bed and walk.” The outward concrete 
miracle was the pledge of the inward. 

Jesus has been called the Son of Fact. We find 
striking illustration of his concreteness at the 
Judgment seat. To those on the right he does 
not say, “You believed in me and my doctrines, 
therefore, come, be welcome into my kingdom.” 
Instead, he says, “I was an hungered and you 


196 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


gave me food; I was athirst, and you gave me 
drink; I was sick, and you visited me; in prison, 
and you came unto me; a stranger, and you took 
me in; naked, and you clothed me.” These “sons 
of fact,” true followers of his, were unwilling to 
obtain heaven through a possible mistake and 
so they objected and said, “When saw we thee an 
hungered and fed thee, thirsty and gave thee 
drink, sick and visited thee?” and the Master 
answered, “Inasmuch as ye did it to one of the 
least of these ye did it unto me.” He was not 
only concrete himself, he demanded a concrete 
life from those who were his followers. 

He told us that the human soul was worth 
more than the whole material universe, and when 
he had crossed a storm-tossed lake to find a 
storm-tossed soul, ridden with devils, he did not 
hesitate to sacrifice the two thousand swine to 
save this one lost man. 

He did not argue the possibility of sinlessness 
—he presented himself and said, “Which of you 
convinceth me of sin?” 

He did not merely ask men to turn the other 
cheek when smitten on the one, to go the second 
mile when compelled to go one, to give the cloak 
also when sued at the law and the coat was taken 
away, to love our enemies and to bless them—he 
himself did that very thing. The servants struck 
him on one cheek, he turned the other and the 


THE CONCRETE CHRIST 197 


soldiers struck him on that; they compelled him 
to go with them one mile—from Gethsemane to 
the judgment hall—he went with them two—even 
to Calvary. They took away his coat at the judg- 
ment hall and he gave them his seamless robe at 
the cross; and in the agony of the cruel torture 
of the cross he prayed for his enemies, ‘Father, 
forgive them, for they know not what they do.” 

He did not merely tell us that death need have 
no terror for us—he rose from the dead, and lo, 
now the tomb glows with light. 

Many teachers of the world have tried to ex- 
plain everything—they changed little or nothing, 
Jesus explained little and changed everything. 

Many teachers have tried to diagnose the dis- 
ease of humanity—Jesus cures it. 

Many teachers have told us why the patient 
is suffering and that he should bear with forti- 
tude—Jesus tells him to take up his bed and 
walk. 

Many philosophers speculate on how evil en- 
tered the world—Jesus presents himself as the 
way by which it shall leave. 

He did not go into long discussions about the 
Way to God and the possibility of finding him— 
he quietly said to men, “I am the Way.” 

Many speculate with Pilate and ask, “What is 
truth?” Jesus shows himself and says, “I am 
the Truth.” 


198 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


Spencer defines physical life for us—Jesus de- 
fines life itself, by presenting himself and saying, 
“Tt am the Life.” Anyone who truly looks upon 
him knows in the inmost depths of his soul that 
he is looking on Life itself. 

There is no deeper need in India and the world 
to-day than just this practical mysticism that 
Jesus brings to bear upon the problems of life. 
“No man is strong who does not bear within him- 
self antitheses strongly marked.” The merely 
mystical man is weak and the merely practical 
man is weak, but Jesus the practical Mystic, 
glowing with God and yet stooping in loving 
service to men, is Strength Incarnate. 

It is no wonder that India, tired of specula- 
tion, turns unconsciously toward him, the mystic 
Servant of all. 


CHAPTER XII 


THE INDIAN INTERPRETATION OF 
JESUS 


THE answer to the question as to what will be 
the distinctive notes in the interpretation of 
Christ through Indian genius and bent can be 
given only tentatively. That answer can only 
be left with India. But that there will be a dis- 
tinctive note is certain. 

The Christian Church in its sanest and most 
spiritual times has fixed upon the person of Jesus 
as the center and real essential of Christianity. 
But as his teaching and life goes through each 
national genius it receives a tinge from the life 
through which it passes. Paul speaks of “my 
gospel.” It was a gospel that had gone through 
the thinking and mentality of a man deeply 
soaked in Judaism. He poured the richness of 
that gospel through those modes of thinking. 
Paul could truly say, “It is my gospel,” for no 
one else could give exactly that same expression 
of Christianity that Paul could give, since no 
one else had the same social inheritance through 
which to express it. 

When Christianity went further and touched 
the brain of Europe in Greece it received an- 

199 


200 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


other expression. As we look back to Christian- 
ity we largely see it through “the binocular of 
Greek metaphysics and Roman law.” Greece 
did the thinking for Europe, and it was in this 
atmosphere that some of our creeds were formed. 
Someone has said that at Pentecost everyone 
heard the gospel in his own tongue, but at Nicea 
the voice was Greek. We are deeply grateful for 
that voice and for those creeds. They have kept 
Christianity very often from drifting into a 
meaningless tolerant theosophy. Carlyle taunted 
Christendom that it had been divided over a 
diphthong, but later he acknowledged that the 
whole of Christianity was probably bound up in 
the question of that diphthong. This preciseness 
of Greek intellect has been a mighty steadying 
force as Christianity has gone on its way. But 
it has by that very preciseness helped to stereo- 
type Christianity in certain mental forms. As 
Christianity went through the Romans many of 
the theories of the atonement were largely taken 
out of the forms found in Roman law. When we 
read of some of those discussions on the atone- 
ment we feel the legal atmosphere—God is the 
Judge, men are mere subjects, the universe has 
law written in it and the relationship between 
God and men is a legal relationship. Certainly, 
it is a great gain thus to have an orderly universe 
and the thought of iron law at the center of 


INDIAN INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 201 


things. But though it had received this con- 
tribution, Christianity found itself cramped in 
the Roman legal forms, even crippled. God is 
more than law; he is love expressing himself 
through law. The world is not a courtroom, but 
a family; and the relationship between God and 
man is not a legal one of ruler and subject, but a 
filial one between Father and son. Our inher- 
itance from both Greek and Roman has helped 
and yet seriously hindered. 

The Anglo-Saxon inheritance has deeply influ- 
enced Christianity. MacDougall reminds us that 
the Norsemen, the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxon 
people, dwelt on the rugged coast-line of Norway. 
They got most of their living from the sea, but 
it was not sufficient, so they cultivated those 
rugged hillsides. It was a precarious existence 
and could sustain only a limited number. When 
the sons came on they were compelled to launch 
out for themselves, for the hillsides could not 
sustain them. Hence they went to distant lands 
and conquered and settled. Out of this social 
inheritance came three great characteristics: 
self-reliance, aggressiveness, and the love of in- 
dividual freedom. Each family became self-suf- 
ficient through its own self-reliance and de- 
pended little on the settled community. 

Those three characteristics are among the 
Anglo-Saxons to-day. Christianity coming in 


202 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


contact with this social inheritance has been ex- 
pressed largely in terms of self-reliance, ag- 
gressiveness, and individual freedom. An Eng- 
lishman speaking before an audience said, “I 
trust I am a Christian Englishman, but I cannot 
help but remember that I am an English Chris- 
tian and that my life has been molded by the 
teachings of the New Testament and by contem- 
poraneous English society.” The forms of ex- 
pression of Christianity in Anglo-Saxon lands 
have been largely individualistic and aggressive. 
This is certainly an inheritance that has en- 
riched, but it has also given only a partial ex- 
pression of Christianity and has lacked those 
deep social meanings and social expressions 
which lie at the heart of Christianity. Prot- 
estantism with its love of individual liberty flour- 
ished in this atmosphere. ' But as someone has 
said, “Protestantism in breaking up the idea of 
a universal church came near losing the idea of 
our universal humanity.” We are just now try- 
ing to counteract that bad effect by the message 
of the social application of the gospel. 
America is also giving us a type of Christian- 
ity that loves such words as “pep,” “snappiness,” 
and “accomplishment.” The Negro question has 
also determined some of the forms that Chris- 
tianity has taken in America. In a certain place 
in America the Negroes and the white people 


INDIAN INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 203 


had a union service. At the close a lady on her 
return home said, “It was all very nice and all 
very Christian, but if we are to be Christian in 
our churches what is it going to lead to?” Here 
was Christianity trying to break through a social 
inheritance and express itself in universal terms, 
but caught and cramped by a social inheritance 
that practically forbade universality. 

The religious genius of India is the richest in 
the world. The forms that it has taken have often 
been the most extravagant, sometimes degrading 
and cruel. These forms are falling away, or will 
fall away, but the spirit persists and will be 
poured through other forms. As that genius 
pours itself through Christian molds it will en- 
rich the collective expression of Christianity. 
But in order to do that the Indian must remain 
Indian. He must stand in the stream of India’s 
culture and life and let the force of that stream 
go through his soul so that the expression of his 
Christianity will be essentially Eastern and not 
Western. This does not mean that Indian Chris- 
tianity will be denied what is best in Western 
thought and life, for when firmly planted on its 
own soil it can then lift its antenne to the heav- 
ens and catch the voices of the world. But it 
must be particular before it can be universal. 
Only thus will it be creative—a voice, not an 
echo. 


204 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


Someone writing to me on the subject said, 
“The first thing necessary is to create a live In- 
dian’’—a man alive to his past, his possibilities, 
his religious genius. Given that spirit Indian 
Christianity will find its own forms as the day 
follows the night. 

The reason that the Indian Christian has not 
made any real contribution to Christian theology 
is because he has been trying, on the whole, to 
think through Western forms and here he is 
like a fish out of water. But now that India 
is awakened and self-conscious and the proc- 
ess of denationalization is probably over, we 
may expect that genius to work. We must be 
willing to trust the Indian to make his contri- 
bution. 

It is no more fair to say that we cannot trust 
Indian genius to interpret Christianity because 
of the extravagances of the past than to have said 
that the Western mind could not be trusted be- 
cause the Druids in England used to perform 
human sacrifices in their religion and the Scots 
practiced cannibalism. 

Every nation has its peculiar contribution to 
make to the interpretation of Christianity. The 
Son of man is too great to be expressed by any 
one portion of humanity. Those that differ from 
us most will probably contribute most to our 
expression of Christianity. 


INDIAN INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 205 


Here is the inward feeling of a patriotic Slav 
as to the contribution of his race. In a personal 
letter written to Professor H. A. Miller more 
than a year before the war by a Bohemian who 
for thirty years had been a professor of German 
in a German Gymnasium, he unbosoms his hopes 
for his people thus: “I am not pessimistic enough 
to give up all hopes that Providence may have 
some good things in store for the Slavs. What 
keeps me up is a certain hazy impression that 
human development may some time be in want 
of a new formula, and then our time may come. 
I conceive ourselves under the sway of the Ger- 
man watchword which spells ‘force,’ and as 
watchwords come and go, like everything else 
human, perhaps the Slavs may some time be 
called on to introduce another which I would 
like to see spelled ‘charity’” (Quoted in Races, 
Nations, and Classes, Miller, p. 80). 

India too hopes that the world may some day 
be in need of a new formula. She too has her 
word ready. It will be spelled “Atma”’—spirit. 
That word “Atma” runs like a refrain through 
everything in India. The followers of the Christ 
of the Indian Road will show us the real mean- 
ing of a spiritual life. They will sit lightly to 
earthly things and abandon themselves to the 
spirit. | 

Along with that will come the sense of the 


206 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


unity and harmony running through things. 
“Don’t you think atonement would mean attune- 
ment?” said a Hindu to me one day. He felt his 
life was “like sweet bells jangled out of tune” 
by sin and evil, and to his mind, craving inward 
peace and harmony, atonement would bring at- 
tunement to the nature of God—music instead of 
a discord. No wonder peace has been the great 
thought and craving of India. Anything like 
losing one’s temper is thought to be utterly in- 
compatible with the truly religious life. “I know 
I haven’t salvation yet,” said a villager to me 
one day, “for while I have conquered everything 
else anger still remain. I haven’t got it yet.” 
The followers of the Christ of the Indian Road 
will be harmonized and peaceful. Meditation to 
them will be real. Religion will mean quiet 
realization. God will be the harmonizing bond 
of all. 

Finally the followers of the Christ of the In- 
dian Road will know the meaning of the cross, 
for India stands for the cost of being religious. 
Renunciation will be a reality, for India instinc- 
tively grasps the meaning of Jesus when he says 
that the way to realize life is to renounce it—to 
lose it is to find it. In the footprints of many of 
his followers as they walk along the Indian Road 
will be blood stains, for they will be Apostles 
of the Bleeding Feet. They will know the mean- 


INDIAN INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 207 


ing of being crucified followers of a crucified 
Lord. 

There is a term and conception that sums up 
these ideas and gives them vital expression—a 
term that is deeply imbedded in India’s thought 
and practice, namely, “Bhakti.” It means faith, 
and yet more than faith; it means devotion, and 
yet is deeper than devotion; it expresses follow- 
ing another, and yet is richer than that. It 
means Self committed to Another—an utter self- 
abandonment, until that Other becomes the life 
of our life, the very center of our being. The 
lesser life is transformed into the moral and 
spiritual image of the Object of the Bhakti and 
draws its very life from the Other. I say “Ob- 
ject,” but that sounds too distant for this rela- 
tion, for here Subject and Object almost cease 
to be, for Life follows into life, Being into being. 

This was doubtless Paul’s conception of faith, 
but the word has lost some of its deep original 
meanings and has become more or less identified 
with belief or trust. Self-committal is not its 
principal content. India will restore this 
through Bhakti. 

But in taking Bhakti from India Christianity 
will broaden and enrich it. With India Bhakti 
has had its center in the emotions. In Christ it 
will be in the whole man. For Christ brings life 
to the whole of life. 


208 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


Now, we believe God to be personal—not cor- 
poreal, but personal. In personality there are 
at least three things, grounded in a fourth—in- 
tellect, feeling and will—these grounded in self- 
consciousness. We too are personal—we have 
those four things. Now, religion is the response 
of my personality to the personality of God. Re- 
ligion means, then, that I would think God’s 
thoughts after him, feel his feelings after him, 
will his purposes after him and become his being 
after him. But apart from Jesus I know little 
of God, so religion means to me to think Christ’s 
thoughts, feel his feelings, will his purposes, and 
become his being. 

Christianity uses ritual, but it is not ritual; 
it has beliefs, but it is not a belief; it has institu- 
tions, but it is not an institution. In its deepest 
meaning it is person giving itself to Person, life 
to Life. 

Jesus said that Bhakti was to be of the whole 
man: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all 
thy heart [the feeling nature], with all thy mind 
[the intellectual nature], with all thy soul [the 
volitional nature], and with all thy strength 
[the physical nature]. The whole man, includ- 
ing the physical, is to be brought under the sway 
of God. But with all thy strength would go 
further than the strength of the physical-—it 
would mean the strength of the mind, the 


INDIAN INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 209 


strength of the feeling, the strength of the will. 
Many are loving God in an unbalanced and un- 
symmetrical way and, therefore, weak way. 
They love him with the strength of the feeling 
and the weakness of the mind—that makes the 
emotionalist in religion; some love him with the 
strength of the emotions and the weakness of 
the will—that makes the sentimentalist in reli- 
gion; others love him with the strength of the 
mind and the weakness of the emotions—the 
mere intellectualist in religion; others love him 
with the strength of the will and the weakness 
of the emotions—this produces the man of iron, 
very moral, but unlovely and unlovable. The 
really strong Christian is one that loves with 
the strength of the mind, the strength of 
the emotions, the strength of the will—the 
strength of the whole personality—the entire 
being caught up in a passion of love and self- 
surrender to Christ. As Christ gives all, he 
claims all. 

So the Christian Bhakti or devotee will prac- 
tice neither the asceticism of the mind, nor of the 
feeling, nor of the will—not asceticism but con- 
secration; not drying up but development; self- 
renunciation in order to self-development. The 
soul thus becomes like a well-directed sailboat— 
a directing mind guiding the rudder (the will) 
and with the sails (the emotions) filled with the 


210 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


winds of heaven. The whole of life will go ahead 
and progress. 

“Bhakti” is a beautiful and rich term and 
broadened by the original Christian conception 
should enrich our expression of Christianity. 

When I think of the type that sums up these 
realities and gives us a sample of a really Indian 
expression of Christianity, I think of Sadhu 
Sundar Singh. In his besandalled feet, his long 
flowing yellow robe, in his lack of earthly pos- 
sessions, in the quiet calm and joy of his face, 
he looks as though he had just stepped out of 
the pages of the New Testament. Here is Chris- 
tianity going through a truly Indian spirit and 
the world bends over to catch the music of it. 
When he goes to Europe there are no halls or 
churches large enough to hold the crowds in 
large university centers.’ As they listen they 
catch the accents that amid the complexity of 
our civilization sound new life that has caught 
the meaning of the supremacy and reality of the 
spirit, that knows harmony and peace and is 
utterly abandoned to the Christ of the Indian 
Road. 

As someone has said, “The final commentary 
on the Gospels cannot be written until India has 
been Christianized.” 


CHAPTER XIII 
THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


SoME time ago I was criticized kindly but 
earnestly by a missionary in India who com- 
plained that “I preached a living Christ instead 
of a dead Christ.” I think I knew what he meant. 
He felt I did not enough emphasize what Jesus 
did, expressed in fixed formulas and set systems, 
not enough of that once-and-for-all-accomplished 
idea. I pleaded guilty, though I could not say 
with my brother that I thought I could go as far 
as he went—maybe further—in believing in what 
Jesus accomplished for us upon the cross. He 
died for me. Fill those words with all the wealth 
of meaning that grateful human hearts can put 
into them and I still feel there is room for some- 
thing else to be said. He was the Unspeakable 
Gift. I weave my formulas about him and he 
steps out beyond them! The Word is too big 
for my words. But I believe in that past. Jesus 
is the same yesterday. Cut the historical from 
the experimental and there will soon be no ex- 
perimental. We must have the past. 

Yet Christ is living to-day. He not only ac- 
complishes for us in the past, he accompanies 

211 


ns 


212 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


with us in the present. Heis no spent force. He 
is the Great Contemporary. Studdart Kennedy 
is right when he says that we do not know what 
it is that is troubling us in our modern world, but 
that it is this: Christ has got hold of us. Weare 
not nearly as smugly complacent as we were. 


| We cannot bring ourselves to obey him abso- 


‘lutely or to turn away from him. } He is getting 
hold of us in East and West. 

I find him in places and movements I had never 
dreamed of and by the quiet sense of his presence 
he is forcing modification everywhere. Call the 
roll of the reforms that are sweeping across 
India, and whether they be economic, social, 
moral, or religious, they are all tending straight 
toward Christ and his thought. Not one of them 
is going away from him, that is, if it be a reform 
and not a reaction. 

A friend in describing Sir George Gabriel 
Stokes, the discoverer of the science of spectro- 
scopy and the theory of the undulation of light, 
told me of how very gentle and retiring he was. 
Along with this modesty he was a saint. He did 
not care a scrap if people did not recognize him 
as the author of these discoveries. He was con- 
stantly behind Kelvin and Thomson and others 
pushing them forward while he remained un- 
noticed. “I cannot tell you,” he concluded, “how 
many things he was behind.” As we sat there 


THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 213 


we talked of how many things Jesus was be- 
hind in India and the East, though often un- 
noticed. 

A Cabinet minister in Japan, in reply to the 
question, “How do you account for the immense 
increase of labor unrest since the war?” instead 
of attributing it to Bolshevism, said, “It is Chris- 
tianity working among the people; the working 
man is testing Christ’s preaching of larger life 
and freedom.” As a non-Christian laborer put it 
to one of our missionaries: “We laborers under- 
stand Christ, for he was a laboring man and bore 
a cross. Every laborer understands that cross, 
for he has to bear one.” Back of many of the 
movements throughout the East the living Spirit 
of Jesus can be felt. 

The last Mohammedan king of Oudh had three 
hundred and sixty-five wives. One of his palaces 
has now been turned into a Legislative Council 
Hall. I sat there in that former harem and 
listened to a debate on woman’s suffrage, and saw 
Hindus and Mohammedans pass the bill unani- 
mously. Up in the galleries was a fine group of 
our splendidly trained and educated young 
women of the Isabella Thoburn College. Again 
and again the speakers referred to their presence 
and one of them said, “We’ve got to give them 
suffrage—see who are looking down on us.” 
Without a word there was the silent pressure of 


214 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


the Christian spirit upon the situation. Jesus 
was back of it. 

Travancore is the most caste-ridden section of 
India. Yet in the very center of it we sat down 
to an intercaste dinner—a hundred high-caste 
Hindus, a hundred outcastes, a hundred Indian 
Christians, a few Mohammedans, and several of 
us of the West. They mixed us up so that here 
was a high caste, next to him an outcaste, a Mo- 
hammedan, one of us, an outcaste again, and so 
on down the line. I sat between a Mohammedan 
and an outcaste. As I sat down the Mohamme- 
dan said, “Well, thank God we are all down to- 
gether at last.” As I sat there and watched the 
amazed faces of those outcastes, faces that bore 
the marks of the centuries of suppression, I 
thought I saw One standing back of them say- 
ing, “I was in prison and you visited me.” The 
chains of the centuries were being broken by the 
pressure of the Spirit of the Son of man upon the 
conscience. 

By the silent pressure of his presence he is 
forcing modification everywhere. Movements 
are springing up, many of them but dimly recog- 
nizing that the impelling Spirit of Jesus is be- 
hind them. “Hindu Christians!” said a discern- 
ing Hindu with a smile to me as we watched a 
crowd of earnest Hindu social workers. Christ 
is abroad upon the Indian Road, and as he sits 


THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 215 


by the wayside the sensitive soul of India knows 
that he understands toil and pain and sorrow 
and enters in and feels with them. One of the 
leading Hindu thinkers of North India at the 
close of my address expressed the truth in these 
beautiful words: “The thing that strikes me 
about Jesus is his imaginative sympathy. He 
entered into the experiences of men and felt with 
them. He could feel the darkness of the blind, 
the leprosy of the leper, the loneliness of the rich, 
the degradation of the poor, and the guilt of 
the sinner. And who shall we say he is? He 
called himself the Son of man. He also called 
himself the Son of God—we must leave it at 
that.” This professor beautifully expressed what 
men are vaguely feeling. 

Jesus does not stand before the blind and the 
leper and the poor and the sinner and discourse 
philosophically on why they are in such condi- 
tion, but lays his hands of sympathy upon them 
and heals them through his servants; and more 
—he puts his gentle but condemning finger upon 
the conscience of the hale and hearty Pharisee 
in the crowd and asks why he has allowed all 
this. “Why?” he persists in asking. And for the 
first time men begin to feel that they are in very 
truth their brother’s keeper, and that the wretch- 
edness of the poor and the sick is not a sign of 
their sin of a previous birth, but the sign of the 


216 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


sin of the privileged in this birth for allowing it. 
Movements come out of such thoughts as these, 
and such thoughts are coming from Christ, very 
often standing unnoticed in the shadows. 

Some do recognize what is happening. The 
Hindu professor of modern history in a South 
India college said to me, “My study of modern 
history has shown me that there is a Moral Pivot 
in the world to-day, and that the best life of both 
East and West is more and more revolving about 
that center—that Moral Pivot is the person of 
Jesus Christ.” It is as interesting as a novel 
to watch men’s thoughts and spirits as they get 
within the sphere of his influence, being caught 
by the attraction of his person and their life be- 
ginning to revolve about him. This is the sphere 
of influence that we watch with bated breath. 
All other spheres of influence in the East created 
for purposes of exploitation and political in- 
trigue are the breeding places for jealousy and 
strife, but this sphere of influence of Jesus is 
healing and cementing and saving. 

Listen to the testimony of this outstanding 
philosopher of India, a man deeply read in the 
philosophy of East and West. When I asked 
him my question I inwardly steeled myself for 
the shock of his criticism, for I knew it would be 
keen. “Professor, what do you think of Jesus 
Christ?” I asked. He replied: “We had high - 


THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 217 


ideas of God before Jesus came. But Jesus is 
the highest expression of God that we have seen. 
He is conquering us by the sheer force of his own 
person even against our wills.” Jesus wins, not 
because of any religious trick or cleverness, but 
because he is winsome; he compels, not because 
he calls in Ceesar’s help, but because he is com- 
pelling; he is Saviour just because men find in 
him what a Saviour ought to be—he saves; he 
draws the world just by being lifted up. 

Christ is confronting men everywhere. He has 
got hold of us. A Hindu lawyer of fine ability 
gave an address to which I listened on the topic, 
“The Inescapable Christ.” He said: “We have 
not been able to escape him. There was a time 
when our hearts were bitter and sore against 
him, but he is melting them by his own winsome- 
ness. Jesus is slowly but surely entering all men 
in India—yea, all men.” The only thing that I 
could think of all through the address was this: 
“Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold. 
Them also I must bring.” How is it possible to 
limit or demarcate the lines of the Kingdom any 
more? He steps beyond them, and, shocked and 
frightened like the Pharisees of other days, we 
stand and wonder how far he will go in his warm 
sympathy and understanding. He eats with pub- 
licans and sinners and with the Hindu too. No 
wonder H. G. Wells in summing up the influence 


218 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


of Jesus upon human history in his Outline of 
\ History exclaims, “The Galilean has been too 
‘great for our small hearts.” 

When this Galilean was upon earth with us 
he said of the outside Gentile’s faith, “I have not 
found so great faith even in Israel.” He must be 
saying the same thing again, for the “outside” 
world surprises us again. I talked in Hindu 
with a Sadhu one day. In the midst of the con- 
versation he broke out into the purest English, 
and pulling a New Testament from under his 
cloak, he said, “This is my meat and drink.” 

“But,” I said, rather taken aback, “you are 
connected with this temple, what are you doing 
with that?” 

“Yes,” he said, and then repeated, “It is my 
meat and drink.” 

When I asked him what he thought of it he 
eagerly replied: “All other religions are passing 
away or will pass away; Jesus alone will remain.” 

Is the faith of the Sadhu being realized? Are 
other things passing away and is Jesus begin- 
ning to fill the horizon? I know it is easy in a 
matter of this kind to overdraw the picture, to 
read into the situation what one would like to 
see, but in the narrative of this little book I have 
let the testimony of the Hindus tell the story. If 
it is overdrawn, they have overdrawn it. But the 
facts themselves tell me that the Sadhu is right. 


THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 219 


Jesus is forcing modification everywhere. He 
stands unmodified. In all this battle and strug- 
gle of things—and Jesus hasn’t won this place in 
the soul of India without his Calvarys of mis- 
understanding and abuse, and there are more to 
come—nevertheless, in this clash of ideas and 
ideals we have not been called upon to modify 
a single thing about him. We are called upon, 
with deep insistence, to modify our civilization, 
our church, ourselves—everything, except him. 
A Hindu principal of a college said to me, “Your 
trouble is with the Christian Church.” Even so, 
but that is remediable. We can remedy our 
church, our civilization, ourselves. But suppose 
he had been able to say, “Your trouble is with 
your Christ’”—that would be irremediable; it 
would be fatal. “Smite the shepherd, and the 
sheep will be scattered abroad.” Smite Jesus 
with a legitimate moral or spiritual criticism, 
and we are worse than scattered abroad. Weare 
done for. But I say the literal truth when I say 
that men are not asking for modification there; 
the demand is for interpretation and imitation. 

Jesus walks along the roads of India’s thought 
and life and everywhere there is a new sense of 
values, a new feeling that there is healing in the 
air, a new sense that there is a springtime of the 
soul upon us as the old frozen forms of life break 
up and melt and there are stirrings of new life 


220 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


all around, a new hope—a regenerating Presence 
has come. I had baptized a group of outcastes 
in their section of the village. At the close of 
the ceremony the father of the house took me by 
the hand and said, “Sir, I want you to walk 
through my compound and through my little 
house, and when you have passed through all the 
impurities and sin of our past will be taken 
away and all will be purified.” I marveled at his 
simple faith in me and shrank from its implica- 
tions. But I was grateful that I did know One 
who was walking along the highways of India, 
through her compounds, into her lowly cottages 
and through the bazaars, and everywhere he goes 
there is a new sense of purity, a new feeling of 
the worth-whileness of life, a new eagerness to 
serve—there is renewal, regeneration. 

“We have met Christ to-day, haven’t we?” said 
a Sadhu with shining face, as he was leaving my 
room. Yes, we had. 

It is India’s day of meeting Christ—and ours. 
In their meeting him, we too have met him. 


As I have sat writing the experiences of these 
seventeen years two simple incidents have kept 
recurring again and again. They were so simple 
that they should have faded with the moment, 
but while the introductory statements of chair- 
men of our meetings have been forgotten, these 


THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 221 


two things persist, and in their persisting bless. 
A little Indian girl of about seven years was play- 
ing around the bungalow with our little girl. I 
was seated on the veranda at my writing. As 
they darted past me the little Indian girl paused, 
and in her shy way came up to me, passed her 
little brown hand across my cheek and said, 
“Apke munh mujhe bahut piyara lagta”—‘Your 
face is very dear to me.” As she ran on I brushed 
away a tear and went on with my writing. But 
my heart was very warm. As I have sat writing 
this book here in America I have felt again the 
soft touch of India’s hand upon my cheek, and 
my heart has been warm, for India has become 
very dear to me. But I find that my love for 
India has a quality in it now that it did not have 
in the early days. I went to India through pity, 
I stay through respect. I love India because she 
is lovable, I respect her because she is respecta- 
able; she has become dear to me because she is 
endearing. . 

The other occurred when I was in Shantineke- 
tan at the Ashram of Tagore. I sat on the edge 
of the steps and watched the temple service one 
day. At the close a student went forward, took a 
lotus flower—the national flower of India—from 
a bowl upon the table in front, came back and 
presented it to me. As I arose to receive it he 
bent and touched my feet, as is the custom with 


222 THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 


their gurus, or teachers. It was done very simply 
and very beautifully. I had come there a 
stranger and a foreigner, I had come openly with 
another faith, and I wondered how I would be 
received, but when this student gave me this lotus 
flower before all, then I knew I was accepted as 
friend and brother—and teacher. To be accepted 
as teacher was the goal of my hopes. But I felt 
myself as much a learner as a teacher. I had 
come to India with everything to teach and noth- 
ing to learn. I stay to learn as well, and I believe 
I am a better man for having come into contact 
with the gentle heart of the East. 

~ But is “teacher” the right word? I wonder 
if “introducer” isn’t better? I spoke to a Hindu 
student one night in the aftermeeting of a series 
and asked him if he didn’t want to know Christ. 
“Yes,” he said, eagerly, “but I do not know how 
to go to him. I need someone to introduce me 
to him.” I suggested that I should love to intro- 
duce him to my Master. I saw quite vaguely 
then what is clear to me now: my chief business 
and chief joy is to introduce men to this Christ 
of the Indian Road. 

If I do that, I must know him myself, and 
that means much. “Have you seen Jesus?” a 
Hindu lawyer asked me one day. I could not 
glibly reply, but slowly said, “Yes, I believe 
I have.” “Then,” said he, “you have found 


THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 223 


something that I have not yet found. I must 
get it.” 

To know him, to introduce him—this is my 
task. tea 
There is a beautiful Indian marriage custom 
that dimly illustrates our task in India, and 
where it ends. At the wedding ceremony the 
women friends of the bride accompany her with 
music to the home of the bridegroom. They 
usher her into the presence of the bridegroom— 
that is as far as they can go, then they retire 
and leave her with her husband. That is our 
joyous task in India: to know Him, to introduce 
Him, to retire—not necessarily geographically, 
but to trust India with the Christ and trust 
Christ with India. We can only go so far—he 

and India must go the rest of the way. 
India is beginning to walk with the Christ of , 
the Indian Road. What a walk it will be! | 








BOOKS BY E. STANLEY JONES 





IS THE KINGDOM OF GOD REALISM? 


ALONG THE INDIAN ROAD 


THE CHOICE BEFORE US 


VIOTORIOUS LIVING 


CHRIST’S ALTERNATIVE TO COMMUNISM 


CHRIST AND HUMAN SUFFERING 


THE CHRIST OF THE, MOUNT 


THE CHRIST OF EVERY ROAD 


CHRIST AT THE ROUND TABLE 


THE CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD 











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